


Amelioration Pattern

by cranialgames (superyuui)



Series: Output Calibration [1]
Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alcohol, Blood, Blood Loss, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Minor Injuries, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, Stitches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2018-10-30 10:41:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 51,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10875078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superyuui/pseuds/cranialgames
Summary: The delicate relationship between the tribes is teetering on a knife-edge, and peace is a heavy responsibility that has somehow landed squarely on Aloy’s shoulders. It isn’t long before everything starts to break down, but the cause isn’t what anyone could have expected.Aloy soon learns that broken systems all have their workarounds - but what could human error have to do with machines?





	1. One

The evening was quiet and peaceful, the silence only broken by the rustling of leaves and the footfalls of her overridden Strider, muffled through the snow and frost-covered grass. Bundled up against the chill in the air, Aloy stifled a jaw-cracking yawn against the back of her hand and urged the Strider further up the narrow mountain path.

Spring was late in the Embrace, and she was looking forward to sleeping in a big bed of soft furs. She felt like she had left Mother’s Crown days ago, and all the travelling aches that had worked their way into her bones since starting her long journey earlier in the week left her feeling even worse.

It was probably her own fault for living so far away, but Aloy didn't have much to do with the Nora anymore. She occasionally ventured into the Embrace to trade, but without Rost, there wasn't anything tying her to the tribe, or to the land she had been raised in. For a while, she had tried to encourage some of the younger Braves to venture as she had, and she had tried to encourage the Matriarchs to allow them to. In the end, she had given up, realising it would probably be easier to talk rivers into flowing uphill.

The only real disappointment had been Varl. Aloy had hoped that she had found a kindred spirit in him, but ultimately she hadn't understood how loyal he was to his people. Still, it was nice to catch up with him during the Proving, which she always made a point to be present for.

The Strider crested the last rise before Rost's homestead just as a light flurry of snow began to drift from the sky. Aloy followed the flakes upwards with her eyes, her smile quickly dropping into a frown. She halted and dismounted the Strider gracefully, ignoring her aches and pains with practised discipline, readying an arrow in her bow.

Aloy passed through the familiar wooden palisades and Grazer dummies, her own light footsteps silenced by the carpet of snow, the bow held steady in her freezing hands. She breathed through her mouth, listening intently for any sound. It had been a long time since anyone had tried to ambush her, and even longer since they'd tried it within Mother's Embrace, but that didn't mean she was complacent.

The fire pit was still smouldering, tendrils of smoke curling lazily into the sky. A small space on one of the sitting rocks next to it had been wiped clear of snow, and thin strips of meat had been left to smoke on the hot charcoals. Aloy studied it briefly and licked her lips before returning her attention to Rost's house.

"I know you're in there," she called out, the point of her arrow trained on the closed door, "come out slowly."

Shuffling sounds came from within. Aloy's breath misted in front of her face, and snowflakes stuck to her eyelashes. She opened her mouth again, ready to give a final warning, when the door started to creak inwards.

A Nora girl, not too much younger than Aloy, stepped free from the shadows and into what was left of the evening sunlight. She paused on the porch with her hands held out in front of her body.

"I'm not stealing," she said, and Aloy snorted.

"Right," Aloy replied, "you're just admiring the craftsmanship."

The girl frowned and wrapped her arms around herself. She was skinny under the thick clothes she was wearing, without any of the lean muscle that Aloy had to protect herself from the worst of the cold.

"I didn't have anywhere else to go," the girl said. Aloy considered her, and finally lowered her bow.

"What's your name?"

"Mera,"

"You're an Outcast?" She asked, already knowing the answer. Mera nodded, as expected. Aloy looked around herself, at the campfire set for one, at the snow falling in thicker drifts from the sky, and the sun flirting with the edge of the mountains in the distance, casting them into early shadow.

"Truce," she offered, tucking the arrow back into her quiver when Mera agreed.

Aloy shouldered her bow and whistled once over her shoulder. The Strider trotted obediently to her side, not slipping at all on the snow and the uneven ground, and Aloy rummaged in one of the packs. Her food stores had almost completely run out, with only a few slivers of cheese left. Her arrows were running low too, after coming across bandits on the road and then being too cold to want to whittle any more. Aloy gathered all of her belongings from the Strider and set it off to idle overnight before trudging up the rest of the path, the steps icy and slippery. Mera had already disappeared inside, and without any hands free, Aloy was left to open door the rest of the way with her shoulder.

"You can stay for tonight," Aloy said to the girl as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, "but any longer and you-..." her eyes fell squarely on the baby cradled in Mera's arms, and her jaw shut with a snap.

"I what?" Mera challenged. The baby was so small. Aloy eyed them both with annoyance and strode purposefully through the long hall, depositing her things in the loft above when she realised her old room was now occupied.

"The tribe cast you out with a baby?" Aloy asked, burying her irritation, speaking as conversationally as she could manage. She picked some of the furs and blankets off of the bed and shook them lightly, trying to dislodge the dust that had settled into them from years of disuse. Luckily, it didn't look like any mites had nested in the pelts.

"The Matriarchs didn't know that I was pregnant when they outcast me," Mera answered at length, her voice floating up to Aloy in the rafters. Aloy paused, fur pelt mid-shake.

"But they didn't take you back when they found out?"

Mera didn't reply for a while. Aloy carefully remade Rost's bed and started to unfasten the more uncomfortable pieces of her armour, stacking them on the floor. She rolled her neck and shoulders with relief, and shook the last few snowflakes from her hair. She could do with a bath, but it was too late to try and heat enough water for it.

"They outcast me when they found out who I'd taken for a Mate,” said Mera.

"Why?" Aloy asked flatly, scratching the skin on her wrists where straps had marked it. She picked one of the woollen blankets from the bed and draped it across her shoulders to fend off the cold.

"I heard stories about you," the girl said from below, ignoring her question, and Aloy rolled her eyes skyward. She couldn't wait for the tribespeople to stop treating her like an idol.

"I've heard stories about me too. Half of them might not be false." Aloy replied sardonically, descending the ladder.

"I heard that you know the Captain of the Vanguard in Meridian." Mera finished, oblivious to her disdain.

"Erend?" Aloy replied, eyeing the baby again warily, "I know him,"

Mera nodded, rocking slowly when the baby began to stir.

"The next time you see Erend, please tell him..." she trailed off. Aloy felt incredibly uncomfortable, until Mera smiled suddenly, "his man Vern is a father,"

Aloy sat heavily across from Mera and leaned toward the fireplace to shift around the old pieces of charcoal.

"Vern, huh? I think I know Vern," she said, and smirked, “I think I've gone _drinking_ with Vern before,”

"He was part of the Sun-Priest's Guard last year," Mera supplied, and Aloy nodded in recognition. The baby yawned and smacked their tiny lips.

“You must’ve been quite taken with him. I thought the Sun-Priest's visit only lasted a day and a night."

Mera shrugged her shoulder and retorted that it was "better than being a hermit,", to which Aloy snorted quietly and shook her head, hauling herself to her feet again.

Using some of the warm embers from the fire pit outside, and some of the driest wood from the indoor store, Aloy got a small fire going in the fireplace. She rubbed her hands together in the heat and winced as the numbness in her fingers became deep aches. She and Mera ate the strips of meat that had been left smoking outside with a wedge of stale bread each and some small slices of hard cheese, finishing off what was left of Aloy's stores. Mera nursed the baby - a boy, too young to have been named yet - and Aloy nursed her aching bones, her thoughts running into each other.

"They outcast you for what, exactly? Being with an Oseram?"

Mera nodded, eyes fixed on the baby at her breast. She stroked his pink, round cheeks with the pad of her thumb. Aloy felt her gut twist, and she turned back to the fire.

"That’s probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard someone get outcast for," she muttered, shaking her head. Mera didn't say anything, and Aloy figured that she would be forever stunned at the Nora people’s unwavering loyalty to the tribe. Even getting thrown out of her home and then being forced to have her baby all alone in one of the harshest parts of the Embrace wasn't enough to make Mera badmouth the Matriarchs.

Mera looked up at Aloy for a moment, opened her mouth, frowned, and glanced away again.

When she did this a further two times, Aloy sighed and turned her head towards her.

“Something you want to ask?”

Mera nodded. “I wondered how the Proving was this year,” she admitted quietly. Aloy blinked - she hadn’t known the reason for her yearly visits was so well-known. Ultimately, it wasn’t that surprising.

“It was pretty uneventful, actually. Well, none of the hopefuls got into fist-fights with each other, at least,” Aloy smirked, “and none of them tried to use their boon to meet me, which was nice,” she added. Mera looked at her, eyebrows drawn together.

“That must get tiring,” she said, shifting the baby in her lap.

“It’s not so bad,” Aloy replied, not meeting her eyes. It wasn’t a very convincing lie, but Mera didn’t chase her up on it.

Warmed in front of the fire, belly full of food, Aloy was starting to feel comfortable for the first time in days. She slouched in her chair, chin on her chest and eyes closed, legs stretched out in front of her. Mera was humming a song - to herself or to the baby, Aloy wasn't sure - and she felt herself drift off before she could even attempt to drag herself up to bed.

 

* * *

 

Aloy woke hours later with the sun directly in her eyes. She shifted and grunted in pain; every muscle and joint was aching and sore.

"I'm too young to feel this bad," she grumbled to herself, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms.

It was early morning, the sun peeking in through the minute gaps in the wooden walls. Mera wasn't anywhere to be seen, but given that the door to Aloy's room was firmly shut, it wasn't much of a stretch to guess where she was. Aloy puttered around the hall quietly while she waited for her extremities to stop aching. In the darkness of the previous evening, she hadn't noticed all the little changes that had happened in the house since she had lived there. The roof tiles were looser, and some of the door frames were creaking more than was really comfortable, but there was also a new set of woven baskets stacked up by the larder, and the ratty cloth that cushioned the chairs by the fire had been patched over. Mera had been living here much longer than Aloy had assumed.

It quickly became clear that Mera hadn't been able to hunt or forage for a while; the usually well-stocked larder had been completely picked empty, and a lot of the dried wood store had been used up. She had already decided to mention Mera’s baby to Matriarch Teersa on her way back through the Embrace, but it wouldn't hurt to stock the house up too, in case it wasn't enough for Mera to be pardoned.

Aloy clambered up to the loft room, her muscles now thankfully recovered from sleeping in a wooden chair all night, and smoothly and methodically replaced her armour. She made a mental checklist: gather wood and shards for arrows, find food and supplies for her journey back, refill the clean water and wood stores for Mera. It wouldn't hurt to see what she could trade from Karst while she was around, either.

From downstairs, Aloy heard the baby cry, and Mera start to stir. Quickly and quietly, she darted out of the house and into the weak morning sunlight.

The snowfall from the previous evening had covered everything in a thick layer of pure white wool, and the air had a refreshing bite to it. Aloy left her Strider behind, taking well-worn paths across the mountains that were as familiar to her as her own skin. She took down a group of Scrappers in one of the valleys and recovered valuable parts from their salvage, and caught as many rabbits as she could carry. As late in the winter as it was, they were all starved little things that wouldn't be as filling as some of the other game she usually came across, but it was better than nothing.

Mid-morning, Aloy started back up the mountainside, plucking the young leaves from hawthorn shrubs as she passed. Snow hadn't fallen as heavily this low down in the valley, and dry twigs snapped under her feet with every step. Despite the peace and solitude of her morning, there was a slight frown on her face. A hole had been singed into her leggings during her fight with the Scrappers, and repairing it was just another thing on the list of things she needed to do before she left to go back home.

She paused suddenly mid-step, head tilted to the side. Unmistakably she heard the tell-tale chirping and whirring of a Watcher making its rounds, but the familiar noise was interspersed with loud, irregular beeps and clicks. Carefully, Aloy readied her bow and arrow in one smooth motion, taking cover behind a tree. The Watcher was too close to avoid, and just as Aloy was calculating the best way to take it out, she felt a pulse of air sweep through her, making all the fine hairs on her arms prickle. The Watcher's lens turned red just before her arrow hit it square-on, and it fell down in a shower of sparks.

Alone once more, cautiously she approached the downed Watcher, her focus alight and sweeping her surroundings. The shock wave she had felt was exactly like the Scanner of a Scrapper, but she couldn't see or sense any other machines nearby. Just as a precaution, she bounced some stones off of distant trees, intending on drawing out whatever had Scanned her. Still, nothing approached.

A gust of wind tugged at her hair and the drape of her clothes, her skin prickling once more. She clicked her tongue and shook her head - clearly she had been alone for too long if she was paranoid enough to confuse _wind_ for getting Scanned.

The Watcher wasn't sparking by the time she turned back to it, and she was thrown off slightly by its appearance. It had looked normal to her when she downed it, but now she noticed that parts of its armour were jagged and stuck out perpendicular from its wire and rubber frame, with two little stems poking out from underneath the damaged plates. The very sight of it bothered Aloy - there's no way she was responsible for that damage - and she didn't waste time taking parts from it and leaving it to rust in the mud.

The image lingered in the forefront of her mind, and she found she was still mulling over it later on that day, whittling arrows while one of the rabbits stewed over the fire.

“Ah! Shit!” She flinched, having nicked the side of her thumb with her knife. Blood welled up in the cut, which she scowled at, and stuck her thumb in her mouth. “Nice one, Aloy,”

 

* * *

 

Aloy spent one more night in the company of Mera and her baby, and even managed to catch a couple hours of sleep in a proper bed. The texture of the pelts was familiar to her, as were the sounds the old house made as it settled. Her dreams that night were from her childhood, and she woke again in the morning feeling peaceful, if not a bit melancholy.

The people at Mother’s Watch were breaking in their duties for lunch by the time she plodded through on the back of her Strider. Safe in the knowledge that her belongings wouldn't be messed with while strapped to the back of the machine, she left it idling just outside the village border and made her way up the incline. People greeted her cheerily as she passed, and some of the older children gaped and whispered to each other in her wake. Aloy balled her hands into fists at her side and her stride increased with determination.

Matriarch Teersa was a busy woman, and as such, Aloy had to wait longer than she would have wanted to have the chance to speak with her. Aloy paced at the foot of All-Mother, anxious to say her piece and get going again. She really wasn't looking forward to the conversation, knowing how stubborn and steadfast in their tradition her tribe could be. Someone dropped their hand onto her shoulder all of a sudden, and out of reflex, she span around and grabbed them by the wrist, twisting it hard. Her opponent yelped loudly.

“You deserved that,” she said, eyebrow raised, dropping Varl’s wrist. He rubbed it and smiled somewhat sheepishly.

“Guess I should know better by now,”

“Probably,” Aloy replied, her face splitting into a wide grin, “I didn't expect to see you up and around so soon after the Proving. Teb told me you were out of commission for a week after the last one,”

Varl shuddered, and somehow managed to look both embarrassed and wistful, “I'm never celebrating with the new Braves again,” he vowed, “I'm actually about to stop for food, if you're not busy?”

Aloy, after making sure Teersa knew she was waiting, accepted Varl’s offer of lunch. It had been a long time since she’d really caught up with him, and she was hoping he would be a good sounding board for her plan.

They managed to squeeze themselves onto the end of one of the large outdoor tables, one which was already bursting with guards fresh off of the night watch. Aloy held the stew she had been served close to her body, the spoon darting up to her mouth with every bite, wolfing down the delicious meal.

“I'm glad you're sticking around,” Varl said between mouthfuls, “we could always use another pair of hands,”

Aloy chewed her food thoughtfully and swallowed hard, “I'm not staying long. I’m leaving after I talk to Teersa, actually,”

“You just came by for the free food?” he asked half-seriously, and laughed, “thanks for stopping by.”

“Of course,” she said, and then added, “There's an outcast by the name of Mera staying in Rost’s home. She has hands, if you’re that short of them.”

The Braves adjacent grew quiet, and Varl scowled, his voice lowering. “She was outcast for a reason,” he hissed.

“So was I, apparently,” Aloy retorted, causing the eavesdropping Braves to look away - in shame or in disgust, she wasn’t sure. She ploughed on with Varl, voice rising, knowing the argument with Teersa would be harder, “and her reason for being cast out is just as ridiculous,”

“Drop it, Aloy,” he warned, glancing off to the side, where people were starting to openly stare. Aloy felt her face grow hot, embarrassed and angry at the same time. She had expected that response, somewhat, but Varl still managed to disappoint her.

“I won’t,” she retorted, “not when she’s out there, alone, with a ba--”

Varl shook his head and stood abruptly, half of his meal untouched. “It looks like Teersa’s ready for you,” he said flatly, “see you next year, Aloy.”

Aloy watched him leave, and then, scowling, stalked away to see Teersa.

It wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to just write a nice Ereloy fic but then this happened and it's looking like it's gonna be a really long story.  
> Updates are gonna be irregular (aiming for Wednesdays) ~~and at this point I can't even guarantee that Ereloy will actually happen organically - I _want_ it to happen, in any case - hopefully that'll be enough.~~  
>  EDIT: Ereloy is gonna happen, repeat, Ereloy is gonna happen, _this is not a drill_


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I haven't exactly planned this fic down to the last full stop, I'll be adding and changing tags as I go.  
> For this chapter, I've added the tags: alcohol, minor illness, minor injury and foreshadowing.
> 
> Please let me know what you think!

Aloy sat across from Teersa at the base of All-Mother, hands clasped in her lap. Other Braves were milling around nearby, almost all of them staring, and Aloy forcibly steered her focus to the other woman. There was a chill in the air that had nothing to do with the weather.

Teersa had her levelled with her piercing gaze, and Aloy clenched her teeth in determination. With every passing second, Aloy felt her hopes sink.

“No, Aloy, we cannot allow Mera to rejoin the tribe,”

Aloy chewed her cheek in an attempt to hide her irritation. She sat back against the wooden chair and propped her ankle up on the opposite knee.

“Why not?”

“Well,” Teersa sighed, “while the knowledge that she had become a mother fills me with joy, I can't ignore the child's father-”

“Is an Oseram, I know.”

“Aloy, please don't interrupt,” Teersa admonished, “it doesn't matter about his origins. The man is a thief.”

“A thief?” Aloy sat forward, elbows on her knees, “why is Mera being punished for that?”

Teersa didn't answer right away, her eyes drifting through the village around them. People were laughing together at the long communal eating tables, and Teersa’s expression was drawn. Aloy sat up straight again and absentmindedly started bouncing her foot.

“Mera chose a Mate that endangered her tribe,” Teersa finally said, her mouth set into a hard line, “that was what she was judged for, and that is why she is an Outcast.”

It was still one of the more ridiculous reasons for being cast out that Aloy had ever heard.

“What about her baby?” Aloy insisted, “Mera didn't have any food left for herself. She needs help, and she won't ask for it.”

“That is a worry,” Teersa agreed, “I could try and arrange for someone to hunt for her - her brother Mert, perhaps, or... I don't suppose you would volunteer yourself for this?”

Aloy shook her head once, pressed her lips together and leaned forward again slightly. Teersa always tried to get Aloy to stay, and one way or another, Aloy always ended up leaving. It was hard to stick around with people that, not very long ago, wouldn't have pissed on her if she was on fire. At length, Teersa sighed.

“I will petition the other Matriarchs, Aloy. That is the best I can promise,

“However,” Teersa added quickly, before Aloy could say anything else, “I will need you to do something for the tribe, in exchange.”

 

* * *

 

Aloy sat atop her Strider, trotting smoothly along uneven ground. She had put a lot of distance between herself and Mother’s Watch already, and had been muttering to herself and scowling the whole way.

A few Braves had reported that the Carja were encroaching on their border with the Nora land, and being who she was, Aloy was apparently the best person to go and deal with it - never mind that she was probably the least diplomatic person on either side of the Embrace. She easily could have refused - she was fairly sure the Carja didn’t want anything to do with the Sacred Lands - but she didn’t want to give Teersa any reason to go back on her promise to try and arrange help for Mera.

The idea of the young mother being left to fend for herself sent chills down Aloy’s spine. She had never heard of the Nora completely abandoning a mother before. Aloy knew, without even having been raised by the tribe, that motherhood was the most sacred state of being to the Nora. She probably would have known even if Rost hadn't been set on raising her in the Nora way; to the Nora, nothing was more important than being a mother.

It depended on the sentence, but usually, a new mother who had been outcast would immediately be welcomed back among their clanmates. Mera’s circumstances being what they were… Aloy had no idea what to think, the whole situation rubbed her the wrong way. Somewhere deep down, she hoped Vern was a thief. She hoped it was that simple.

With a dig of her heels, Aloy urged the Strider on, picking up speed. The air had turned cold and smelled of rain, and she wanted to find decent shelter before she got caught in the storm. She was still about a week away from Meridian, and it wouldn’t do her any good to get her clothes and supplies soaked through.

Not long after the defeat of HADES, when she was making this same journey, she had managed to get herself and her Strider knocked straight into a river. Aloy had still not entirely recovered from the battle - and the long campaign before it - and by the time she dragged herself across the long bridge to Meridian, she was delirious with fever. Everything that had come out of her mouth that day had been completely ridiculous, and had made perfect sense to her at the time, of course, but had caused a fair amount of uproar amongst the Carja nobles she inadvertently insulted. Erend, and a few of the other members of the Vanguard who had been there to see it, had found the entire thing hilarious, and had never quite let her live it down. Since that time, as funny as it had apparently been, she had tried not to let herself travel for more than a day in wet clothes.

Shelter eventually appeared in the form of a fallen Bellowback. It looked like it had been killed weeks before, its body picked apart by scavengers so that only the skeletal frame and a few larger plates of metal remained. It had fallen draped against a moss-covered boulder, and the space underneath it was easily large enough for her and her things. She was plugging up all the gaps in the cover the Bellowback provided when the first fat droplets of water started to fall. Quickly, she covered the largest gaps with needle-covered branches and tied them down with some of the Bellowback’s loose cables before darting under cover.

It took a while to get a small fire going, the only wood available to her being the damp, flexible twigs that were scattered on the ground, presumably there from when the Bellowback fell. The cut in her thumb was stinging, and she was on the verge of giving up and snuggling up to her Strider for warmth when the twigs finally caught fire. Satisfied that the tiny wisps of smoke from her fire were masked by the rain, she pulled out a small knife and some ridge-wood, deciding to pass the time making arrows. It was fairly comfortable in her little bolt-hole, with the rain against the makeshift roof, pinging against the metal of the Bellowback and pattering against the branches.

Warmth radiated from her Strider parked at the one open end, acting as a windbreaker, and the fire flickering at the other. She leaned back against the boulder, the mossy earthy smell of it filling her nostrils, and only half-heartedly hoped for the rain to clear up quickly.

Aloy chewed through some of her supply of dried meat while she worked, her thoughts not dawdling in the past as they had up to that point, but instead already racing through the winding streets of Meridian. She grinned to herself - a trip to Meridian was never dull, and it had been a few months since she and her handful of friends had spent the night swapping stories over many mugs of beer. The last time Aloy was there, Erend and one of the soldiers, after more than a few pints each, had challenged each other to a game of strength. Unfortunately for Erend, the soldier was drunk enough to miss his hammer-swing entirely, hitting Erend in the foot and breaking some bones.

“Eh,” Erend had shrugged the day after, hungover as hell and with a broken foot to go with it, “it'll grow back.”

His foot _had_ repaired. The amputated toe, however, had not.

In her peripheral vision, Aloy saw the Strider’s lens turn amber. Immediately she perked up, alert, her muscles tensed. The Strider got awkwardly to its feet, accidentally knocking some of the branches off of the Bellowback, and trotted out of sight.

“Hey!” Aloy yelped, pitching forward on hands and knees to see where it was going. She whistled and the Strider paused for a moment, but then just shook its head and carried on going.

Aloy would have just let it go, and spent a moment eyeing the rain thinking of doing just that, but some of her packs were still strapped to its side. She cursed loudly and scrambled out from under the cover, hastily grabbing her bow and quiver of new arrows.

The rain had already turned the forest floor to mud, which squelched underfoot as she ran. Her hair was quick to get soaked through, and stuck in cold clumps to the back of her neck. Her clothes were naturally waterproof, but that didn't stop the water trickling down her skin and under the layers of soft leather and cotton.

The Strider lead her deeper into the forest, where the needle-leaved trees grew close together and thin branches grabbed at her as she passed by. Her clothes snagged on prickly hedges and her feet twisted around exposed roots laid across the forest floor like slippery ropes.

Finally, the Strider crashed through a break in the trees, and Aloy stopped abruptly at the edge of the clearing. She placed her palm flat on the damp trunk of the tree beside her, chest still heaving from her sprint, and peered into the brightly-lit gap in the trees, squinting at what had caused her to stop her pursuit.

There was a person, clad in blue, sat on some gnarled tree roots. They wore a machine’s skull on their head, from which hung many blue and purple ribbons. Aloy watched as they reached a thin arm out towards her Strider - which had run right up to them - and, oddly, started to pat it on the end of its long head.

Aloy activated her Focus. It wasn't odd to find Banuk wandering the land on their own, but it also wasn't odd to run into an ambush of bandits in disguise.

“Nobody here but us and the wind, Machine-Rider,” the Banuk called out to her. Aloy jumped in surprise and, once she had confirmed for herself that they were alone, made her way into the clearing, her bow still in hand. The rain had turned into thin mist, and her skin tingled. The Banuk was still petting her Strider. The ground underfoot was solid and dry, the air warm. Had the rain not passed through this part of the forest? How far had she run?

“We're all going the way of this one, I'm afraid,” the Banuk said when she had drawn level with them. For the first time, Aloy realised that what the Banuk was sat on was not tree roots, but the mangled, moss-covered corpse of a machine. Aloy swallowed and clenched her jaw.

“What have you done to my machine?”

The Banuk laughed at her.

“Watch your path, machine-rider,” they warned, lips still twisted into a grin, their voice as gnarled and withered as their hands, “mind the ripples,”

Aloy stared at them in open confusion. Their sunken eyes peered out from between the draped ribbons of the headdress, black pupils surrounded by white. A breeze toyed with the ribbons, and Aloy caught a glimpse of the face hidden within. The Banuk, who had otherwise looked and sounded like they were many decades older than Aloy, had the face of a young man.

“What do you mean? What ripples?” Aloy asked, when she had recovered from the shock.

The Banuk gave her Strider a pat.

“There are whispers about you, Al-oy,” he said, completely mispronouncing her name, “they say you will be the one to weld us together when the machines split us apart,”

“Yeah,” Aloy interrupted, “that already happened. A few years ago, actually,”

“Or did it only just start?” The Banuk countered. Aloy snapped her mouth shut, and he grinned widely, showing flashes of jagged teeth behind the cover of his headdress, “Enjoy it all while you can, girl. The wind is changing.”

Aloy tried to talk, and then threaten, some real answers out of the mysterious Banuk. He was immovable and evasive at the same time - it was kind of like trying to get a straight answer out of Blameless Marad. All too soon, the sky started to darken, the rain catching up with her, and she was forced to make the slippery ride back to her belongings on the back of her reclaimed Strider. Aloy was totally soaked to the skin by the time crawled back inside the dead Bellowback and, shivering, brought the remains of her little campfire to life.

Mulling over the strange things that had happened that day, Aloy swapped her sodden clothes for the slightly drier ones in her bag, twisting her wet hair off of her neck and up into a thick knot. It didn’t take long before she was dry and warm, but still she slept fitfully.

It seemed that nothing would be hot enough to melt the fear in her belly.


	3. Three

The journey to the edge of the Sacred Lands and towards the Carja Sundom took Aloy longer than she had hoped. Drying her things out from the rain had delayed her by at least half a day, and none of the machine sites she usually either avoided or salvaged from were quite where she remembered them to be, so she ended up losing another day or two to unplanned detours.

The worst part was that her Focus was starting to play up. More than once she had been hunting machines only to get false readings from the device she, admittedly, relied heavily upon. Luckily, it seemed to only be detecting _more_ machines than were actually there, which was something she could probably live with until she figured out how to fix the device - if it had been the other way around, and she was seeing _less_ machines than were actually there, she would have a real problem.

Finally, the trail opened out across the desert and Meridian came into sight, perched high atop the sands below. Aloy grinned and pushed the Strider for one last burst of speed, taking the bridge at a canter. She dismounted the Strider at the end of the bridge and, to pacify the people that were still understandably wary of machines, harnessed it to an iron ring in the wall which was put there for such a purpose.

Aloy shouldered a large, bulky knapsack that she had brought with her and set off through the labyrinthine streets, the afternoon sun beating down overhead. The market, as usual, was full of people peddling their goods, every table full to bursting of everything a person could ever want. Aloy was recognised by her hair alone, and many of the people waved as she passed. Aloy drew attention on most days, but with the large knapsack thumping against her thigh as she walked, she found herself on the receiving end of more than a handful of curious glances. Grinning to herself, Aloy snuck past the palace guards and slunk down the steps towards the war rooms.

The Captains all shared this wing of the palace to work, but the sun was high in the sky, and much of it was deserted for the midday meal. A few officers lingered, bent over scrolls and ledgers, and only one or two raised their heads as she passed. She carried on through the familiar corridors, undeterred, and knocked on the heavy wooden door at the very end. Not waiting for a reply, she pushed the door open.

The room on the other side was spacious and light. It was sparsely decorated, with just a large wooden desk and chair near to the windows on the opposite wall, and a couple of scroll shelves taking up the wall on the left. A warm breeze was floating through the open windows, carrying with it the sounds of the townspeople in the streets below.

“This better not be about the chickens again, Galand,” Erend said curtly, his back to her. He was bent over a second table which was littered with groups of different coloured markers, his fingers tapping the tabletop rhythmically. He had removed his wrist guards, and his shirt sleeves were pushed up around his elbows. A muscle in his thick forearm jumped as he tapped.

Aloy cleared her throat pointedly, and he turned to her, his a face a picture of surprise.

“It's not about the chickens,” she promised, smirking, and Erend recovered, snorting inelegantly.

“It better not be,” he warned, chuckling, turning back to his work.

“What's this?” she asked, stepping up beside him. The tabletop was carved intricately with concentric circles, looking somewhat like an onion that had been sliced through, but with lots of clusters of squares throughout.

Meridian looked strange from above.

Aloy placed her palms flat on the wooden surface, and bumped Erend's arm with her shoulder. He bumped back, the corners of his mouth turned up into a grin.

“It's kind of.. hush-hush, I guess,” he hedged. It wouldn't be long before he told her, then.

“‘I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you’?” she quoted.

“Kind of. What's that from?” he asked, moving a section of wooden markers a finger’s-width to the right of where they had been originally.

Aloy shrugged, picking up one of the coloured pieces and examining it, “it's something I heard in a Metal ruin once. It sounded dramatic.”

Erend snorted with amusement and took the piece from her, setting it back on the table.

“There was a machine breach in the village a few days ago,” Erend explained, “I'm trying to see if I can spare the men to help re-fortify. Problem is that we're still spread pretty thin as it is,”

Aloy looked up at him quizzically, “Talanah couldn't get any of the Hunters Lodge members to enlist? It sounded like it was a sure thing,”

“It didn't go to plan,” Erend said lowly, chewing the inside of his cheek and glaring at the wooden soldiers.

Aloy and Erend stood shoulder to shoulder and studied the map for a moment longer. He wasn't lying about them being spread thin; natural weaknesses, like the bridge, were covered, but there were big gaps in cover elsewhere in the city. No wonder it had been so easy for her to sneak into the war rooms.

Erend sighed loudly, shook his head, and turned to her properly.

“Enough of work. I'm more interested in whatever that barrel-shaped thing is you've got there,” he said, gesturing at her knapsack.

“Well, Captain, what I have here is a keg of ale, straight from Mainspring,” Aloy replied, pulling back the flap on her knapsack to reveal the small keg inside, an Oseram marking branded into the wood’s surface. Aloy saw Erend’s eyebrows jump upwards when he caught sight of it, and she turned her hip, pulling the bag away from Erend’s reaching hand, “do you know where Vern is? I need to congratulate him,” she said, eyes alight with mischief.

“What does Vern need congratulating for?” Erend asked, hooking a finger into the lip of the knapsack and peeling it away, revealing the rest of the marking on the barrel. He whistled a single note of appreciation, “Don't tell me this ale is for him,”

“I need to tell Vern that he's a father,” Aloy said.

Erend frowned as he processed what she said; she could almost see the cogs turning in his brain, and she bit her lip hard to keep from snickering. He glanced up, looking Aloy in the eye, then looking down at her belly, and back again. She laughed at him and the comically stunned expression on his face.

“ _You_ , and-” he started, and cut himself off. Aloy rolled her eyes, still chuckling.

“Yes, in the four months since my last visit, I had a baby. Also, instead of bringing the baby with me, I brought ale,” she said sarcastically, thumping him hard on the arm when he gaped at her, still not getting it, “the mother is a Nora girl,”

“But not you,” he queried while he rubbed his arm, pretending it had hurt.

“Not me,” she confirmed. Erend sank back against the table.

“Thank the sun,” he muttered, probably only half joking. Aloy wasn't sure if she should be offended or not. “Is the ale at least for me?” Erend lamented.

Aloy smirked and deposited the barrel onto a clear spot on the tabletop. “The ale is for you.”

“Wonderful,” he said emphatically, slapping his large hand down onto the flat top of the barrel, rattling all of the wooden soldiers on the table, “let's crack it open and see if drinking the gnat piss the Carja prefer has ruined me,”

Aloy snickered and opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by a quiet knock on the door. Erend looked to it, visibly exasperated, and then back to her. Aloy shrugged her shoulder; she _had_ interrupted him at work, after all.

At Erend’s admittance, an olive-skinned man entered the office, a folded sheaf of paper in his hands. He glanced between them briefly. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead.

“Aad,” Erend said, by way of greeting.

“Urgent message, sir,” Aad said, holding the paper up with a jerk of his hand, a slight tremor in his voice. Erend took the letter from him and read it quickly, and Aad wrung his hands. Aloy eyed him curiously - she hadn't met him previously, and he didn't look like a member of the Vanguard, or like a soldier at all.

Erend groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose, and the knot in Aad’s throat bobbed. Erend dropped his hand, his eyes passing over Aad before settling on Aloy.

“I need to take care of this,” he said apologetically, nodding at the letter, “could you come back later?”

Aloy frowned at him searchingly. “That’s fine,” she said at length, “what’s wrong?”

Erend waved his hand, shaking his head. He turned toward his desk and made to drop the letter on top of it, paused, and tucked it into his shirt pocket instead. Aloy watched him intently, curiosity piqued.

“Avad,” Erend said simply, by way of explanation, before elaborating, “he’s had me meet him twice a day for weeks, it’s-” he stopped abruptly, catching sight of Aad again, who was still stood there looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Erend cleared his throat and took on a more formal tone of voice, “look, Aloy, I’ll talk to you later. Usual place. I’m sure everyone’s dying to see you.”

A muscle in Aloy’s jaw ticked as she clenched her teeth, keeping her face as neutral as possible. She was being dismissed, like an errant child, and it didn’t sit right with her. She lifted her chin and regarded him coolly.

“Sure. No problem.” she said, before turning on her heel and stalking from the room.

 

* * *

 

 

Aloy’s eyes stung with sand as she charged her Strider through the desert surrounding Meridian. After leaving Erend’s office, she had gone straight to the Hunters Lodge, intent on finding her friend and having a conversation that didn’t end with said friend pulling rank on her. Talanah was, however, nowhere to be found, and Ligan had given Aloy an odd look when she had asked where the Sunhawk was.

Frustrated, Aloy had gone straight for her Strider, intending on leaving. She had been an hour’s ride out from the city when she remembered her deal with Teersa - the reason she had travelled all the way to Meridian in the first place - and yanked the Strider back around so hard that some of its neck cables nearly detached from its shoulders. She charged down the dusty, rocky roads, the Strider’s hooves thundering beneath her.

Suddenly, her Strider jerked to the side, almost unseating her when it reared up onto its hind legs. Aloy held on tight, wrestling the Strider for control. A shower of sparks erupted in front of her face. She protected her eyes with her arm and the Strider finally succeeded in throwing her off. Aloy fell hard to the ground behind it and rolled to the side to avoid the volley of arrows hurtling towards her. A Carja soldier rushed her Strider, feather-adorned spear held aloft, ready to strike.

“Hey!” Aloy barked. She darted forwards and parried the Carja’s strike with her own spear. The soldier kicked her hard in the ribs, and she grunted in pain. She twisted, lifting her spear over her head, but before she could bring her arms down for the hit she was caught again, the Carja soldier ramming the butt of his spear into her thigh. Aloy body-slammed the soldier off balance and jumped back out of range.

“Savage,” the soldier spat viciously while Aloy glared at him, “turn back to your own land.” His eyes were wild, and the clothes under his armour were ragged and soot-stained. He reminded her somewhat of another rogue Carja that she knew, but this soldier was far more unseated than Nil ever seemed.

“This is the border,” Aloy retorted, baring her teeth, “you’re further from home than I am.”

The soldier lunged again, but this time, Aloy was prepared. She darted forward and thrust the blade of her spear up through the bottom of the soldier’s jaw. He gave a sickening gurgle, and she let him fall to the ground. He coughed wetly, blood pooling on the sand beneath him, and jerked once or twice before, finally, he lay still.

Aloy pulled a face and used the business end of her spear to cut off his armour, baring his chest. Burned into the skin over his heart was the image of a black skull. The rumours that the Nora had heard, of the Carja encroaching on their land, all clicked into place in Aloy’s mind.

“They’re bandits,” she muttered to herself, “I should’ve known.”

Aloy crouched to pick the bandit’s pockets and hissed wordlessly when pain flared up her leg. There was a long gash in her thigh, where the bandit’s spear had struck her, and it was dripping blood onto the sand. The wound was deep, and her blood was already soaking through her leggings. She hobbled over to a nearby rock and sat upon it, cleaning and stitching up her wound with practiced efficiency. The sun flirted with the horizon while she worked; she would have to return to the city soon, or face sleeping out in the desert without a tent.

After pickpocketing the bandit, and leaving him naked in the sun for good measure, she awkwardly mounted her Strider. Even though the gash was stitched up, it still stung angrily, and getting pulled backwards and forwards with the gait of her steed didn't do much to help the discomfort. By the time she had returned to Meridian and was mooring up the Strider, the wound was pulsing hotly, and had started to itch as it mended.

The heavy knapsack, now full of machine salvage, went across the opposite shoulder to her injury, and Aloy made her way stiffly through the market. Haggling went much better than usual, with her stormy expression making her look as bad-tempered as she felt - nobody seemed to want to make her angrier, and she wasn’t entirely above using it to her advantage. Within no time, she had a good amount of shards for her day’s effort, and she was shuffling it all around in her pocket when she reached the tavern.

The Iron Hammer was a fairly new establishment in the city, owned by some of the Oseram migrants and frequented by many of the Vanguard. It was the kind of pub that always felt crowded and noisy, packed with many bodies in armour, laughter and loud conversations clashing and intermingling with each other. It had taken Aloy a long time to feel comfortable - or, at least, not intimidated - by such a boisterous atmosphere, and the steadfast respect that most of the Vanguard seemed to have for her made it much easier.

“Aloy!” someone called above the din. She turned toward the voice to see Galand waving his arm, flagging her down. Galand was a particularly burly Oseram man - which was definitely saying something - and it was a miracle he managed not to clothesline anyone with his massive arms. He ushered the others around him to make room for her, and she was just about able to squeeze in between them all - grinning and rolling her eyes when they all cheered drunkenly at her. Someone passed her a mug of beer, which she sipped, and Galand continued the story he had been telling.

“Like I was saying,” he said, his words slurred at the edges, “it was a long night, I’d had a few. I saw a chicken pecking around near the houses and thought I’d return it, so-- hey!” he started waving again, and Aloy ducked hurriedly, “Talanah!”

Talanah’s black-haired head appeared in the crowd. She beamed when she caught sight of Aloy at the table and made a beeline for them, holding her own mug of ale above her head so it wouldn’t get jostled. She had gone without her usual armour, that night, and her face paint glistened in the glowing light of the pub. Galad resumed his story once more.

“I fell _right into_ this old lady’s house, feathers were everywhere, she was screaming for the Guards, my shoes were gone-”

“I'd say it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure this visit is sooner than your last ones have been,” Talanah teased, leaning close so she could be heard over Galand’s booming voice, shimmying into the spot on Aloy’s other side. Aloy grinned and clunked their mugs together in greeting.

“You've been so busy, I'm surprised you noticed,” she shot back, smiling widely. Talanah wrapped her arm around Aloy and squeezed her. Aloy returned her embrace, the worry she had harbored for her friend all afternoon dissipating and leaving her full of relief. The men at the table broke out into raucous laughter, Galand having no doubt reached his punchline, and Talanah shrieked as her ale was spilled after all.

“It’s good to see you,” Aloy said sincerely, once everything had been wiped up and Talanah’s mug had been refilled.

“Well, you’ll be seeing a lot more of me,” Talanah said, a melancholy twist to her lips, “I’ve had a lot more free time since I got dethroned,”

Aloy stared at her, processing, waiting for the punchline. In her mind, Redmaw’s massive, blood-stained body loomed above her, its jaws ready to snap her in half. She suppressed an involuntary shudder, glad that she and Talanah had been watching each other's backs on that occasion. The idea that worse things existed out there now was nothing short of sobering.

“How?”

Talanah glanced over her shoulder, and leaned in close to whisper.

“Follow me,” she said, and took Aloy’s hand, leading her through the tavern and out into the cold night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're finally getting to the plot! Sorry it's taking me so long!  
> I would love some feedback on this - it's been a long time since I wrote anything, or undertook a project that's going to be this long.
> 
> EDIT: SO while going back over the game's storyline while nitpicking at my own storyline I realised that Fas - the father of Mera's baby - shared a name with Faro Automated Solutions. I dun goofed, and it's bugging me, so **Fas is now called Vern**. I'll repeat this note at the beginning of the next chapter.


	4. Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going back over the game's storyline while nitpicking at my own storyline I realised that Fas - the father of Mera's baby - shared a name with the acronym for Faro Automated Solutions. I dun goofed, and it's bugging me, so **Fas is now called Vern.**
> 
> Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!

Hand-in-hand, Talanah and Aloy wound their way through the streets, hidden mostly in shadow. They arrived right at the base of the steps leading up to the Hunters Lodge when Talanah turned and instead lead her down into a small alley, where an old, heavy door was set into the side of the wall. At that time in the evening, there were still one or two people milling around in the streets, and Talanah was careful to avoid them all.

“This is where the Sunhawk trophies are kept,” Talanah explained, “I'm not really supposed to be down here anymore,” she added conspiratorially.

Aloy looked quizzically at the back of her friend’s head as Talanah eased the old door open, its iron hinges complaining all the way. Inside was a long hall of machine parts on pedestals, each trophy larger than the one before. Candles flickered from the floor, the light from the small flames casting odd shadows that jumped and danced. Aloy, reminded of All-Mother, felt chilled despite the muggy underground heat.

Their footsteps echoed around the long chamber, and Aloy looked into the dead lenses of each fallen machine as they passed. At the end of the row of trophies sat Redmaw’s skull. Its jaw was set open in a snarl, and its polished metal skin was gleaming in the candlelight. Aloy lifted her hand and carefully traced a finger along the edge of its mouth, the usually smooth metal jagged and dented from the many battles it had undoubtedly faced.

“It’s smaller than I remember,” she murmured, and Talanah hummed in agreement. Aloy let her gaze fall away from Redmaw to view the pedestal on its other side - to see what had been deadlier than Redmaw had. Her eyebrows knitted together at the sight of the machine skull placed there, undoubtedly the head of a Stalker. How had a Stalker been deadlier than a Thunderjaw? Than _Redmaw_? She studied the trophy for a few seconds longer, activating her Focus when the answer wasn't immediately forthcoming. Her eyes widened and she inhaled in surprise, glancing at Talanah for confirmation, hoping her Focus was malfunctioning again. Talanah nodded gravely, and a lead weight settled into the pit of Aloy's stomach.

The machine that the trophy had come from was no Stalker that she recognised. This Stalker had mutated, with guns much larger than it should have been able to host spliced onto its back.

“What's worse than a Thunderjaw,” Talanah said darkly, “but a Thunderjaw that turns invisible?”

Aloy stared wide-eyed at her friend, pressing her lips together hard to keep from laughing. A Stalker with Thunderjaw weaponry? It was ridiculous!

“This is… you don't believe this is _real_ , do you?” she asked Talanah incredulously, when the initial surprise had worn off and she had more control of herself.

“I didn't,” Talanah replied, regarding the trophy with her eyes narrowed, “but when some of the Hawks died to it, I investigated for myself.”

The laughter dropped right off of Aloy's face. Talanah’s expression was grave, and Aloy knew her friend.

Talanah wasn’t playing a joke on her.

“How many Hawks?” Aloy asked tentatively.

“Three,”

Aloy sucked in a breath. “Talanah, that's…” She trailed off. Her heart was breaking for her friend - her friend, who had had to watch her brothers-in-arms die all over again. Aloy reached out and gently touched Talanah’s arm, “I'm sorry,”

Talanah shrugged her shoulder, her lips twisting into a half-smile. “Kind of makes it better for me that I'm not the Sunhawk anymore. I have more time to find the source, now that people aren't watching everything I do,”

Aloy understood that feeling perfectly well. She didn't quite understand why it would matter so much to Talanah, who had taken to the role of Sunhawk like a Snapmaw took to water. When asked, Talanah grimaced, and shook her head.

“The Sun-King is worried this could be a second Derangement. He doesn't want the people to panic.”

“That makes sense,” Aloy acknowledged. But why would Avad worry about such a thing, unless- “this isn't the first time this has happened, is it?”

“It's the first one of its class, but, no, this isn't the first,” Talanah confirmed with a sharp nod, “everything apart from this has been weak, and didn't come that near to the city. This guy-” she nodded again, at the Stalker, “-changed everything.”

 

* * *

 

Aloy and Talanah made their way back to the tavern in silence. It was just as packed inside as it had been when they'd left, and, impossibly, even more raucous. Talanah had shrunk into herself while they were in the trophy chamber, but back in the tavern, with her shoulders held back and a smile on her face, nobody would have expected that she was anything other than relaxed and enjoying her evening. Aloy could feel the frown lingering on her own face, and wished she was as good at compartmentalising as her friend was.

Erend had joined the group in their absence, and still seemed to be much more sober than his men, who all cheered upon seeing Aloy and Talanah return. Erend’s tense gaze met hers, his eyebrows lifting when he looked between the two of them. When they had sat back down, he motioned for Aloy to lean closer. She shifted across so that her ear was close to his mouth. He smelled like cured leather and desert sand.

“I was going to tell you myself,” he said to her, loud enough for only Aloy to hear beneath the din of drunken men and women, “if Aad hadn’t been there.”

“I guessed,” Aloy replied before he could elaborate further, pulling away from him. He looked at her searchingly, his iron-coloured eyes staring into hers, and gestured down at her injured leg.

“Who got the lucky shot?”

Aloy chewed her cheek. “A bandit,” she said simply, not really wanting to get into the details, “it’ll grow back,” she added, smirking.

Erend laughed, and lifted his already half-empty mug to her.

“In that case, may his corpse be eaten by Glinthawks,” he pronounced, and Aloy knocked their mugs together with a wry smile. She drank deeply, letting the buzz of the ale warm her up from the inside out.

Across from her, two of the soldiers were engaged in a tense argument over which of them it was that the barmaid kept eyeing up. Talanah, sat between them, caught Aloy’s eye and covered her grin with her hand. One of the soldiers finally got to his (unsteady) feet and sauntered over to the bar, leaning against it in what he probably thought was a good impression of a sober person. Aloy watched as he puffed his chest out and made a show of downing the rest of his mug, flexing his arm muscles as much as was possible to do without it looking like he'd done it on purpose, ruining the entire effect when he slid backwards off of his bar stool. The barmaid held herself together for a few moments - much longer than Aloy would have - before bursting into peals of laughter, followed by the rest of Aloy’s table, who also pointed and jeered. Next to her, Aloy heard Erend choke on his beer.

“I almost feel bad for the guy,” Galand commented loudly, clapping the soldier next to him on the back, “your turn, Dai. Get us a round in when she dumps you too,”

The soldier, Dai, spluttered, turning red in the face. The other Vanguardsmen jeered and teased, and Erend leaned close to her again.

“Here's your man,” he said, nodding towards the bar. It took Aloy a moment before she spotted him, but she recognised Vern immediately. All of the Oseram men tended to look distinctive, and where Erend favoured his hair shaved into a lone strip on top of his head, Vern preferred to let his hair grow long. It wasn't a style that a warrior should prefer, really, but Aloy supposed she had never been impeded by it, either.

She exhaled in a drawn-out huff. “Well, time to go change his life,” she announced, before taking a long pull of warm ale from her mug. Erend patted her shoulder, not dissimilarly to how Galand had done for Dai to give him courage, and she stood on wobbly legs.

Getting Vern away from the bar and outside into the cool quiet of the night was easy. Finding the words, however, was hard. Vern had just come off of his shift, and was stone-cold sober. Aloy found herself wishing that they were both a little less so.

“I went back to the Embrace a couple of weeks ago,” she started to explain, wringing her hands in front of her. Vern looked bemused, but didn't seem like he would interrupt. He was leaning against the exterior wall of the pub, smoking a little roll of crushed leaves, and Aloy suddenly wondered if he thought she was trying to chat him up. She edged back half a step, and decided to just get on with it. “I saw Mera, and she had a young baby,” she continued, and the smile started to slip away from Vern’s face, “she wanted me to tell you that. That she had your baby.”

Vern’s eyes grew as wide as a Watcher’s, and his mouth hung open, slack. He seemed as if his knees were about to buckle, so Aloy manoeuvred him over to a wooden stump not far away from the tavern’s door, probably put there for those who had had more than their fill. Vern sat heavily, his gaze uncomprehending, and she crouched down before him.

“A baby?” he finally said quietly. Aloy nodded, and smiled encouragingly.

“A boy,” she added, and he dipped his head in recognition. Aloy smiled, recalling the day she had spent in Mera’s company. While she had been on the defensive, Mera was strong and didn't mince her words - both traits that Aloy appreciated. She liked Mera; she would have run her out of Rost’s home, and wouldn't have asked Teersa to watch over her and her baby if she didn't. Briefly, she told Vern of his son. Still in shock, he just nodded blankly.

Something rumbled underfoot, and Aloy spun her head towards a loud crash in the distance. In an instant she was on her feet again, Focus activated. Above the rooftops, she caught glimpses of metal wings beating against the night sky. Beside her, Vern had snapped out of his shock and was just as alert as she was, reaching for the axe from his back. Aloy held up a hand to stop him.

“Get the Captain,” she ordered, the tone of her voice leaving no room for argument, “and whoever else who isn't drunk- but keep it quiet,”

Aloy didn't turn to see if Vern had acknowledged her or not, but as he brushed past her side to re-enter the tavern, she figured it was as good as done. She took off at a sprint towards the sound of Glinthawk screeches, her footsteps thudding on the yellow stone floors of Meridian’s streets. Her vision was alight with readings from her Focus; the crisscrossing web of purple lines was interspersed with multiple yellow figures - people, all running away from the same place.

A single Glinthawk hovered in the sky on the edge of the mesa, belching fire from its long beak, its fluid sac full of Blaze. Aloy grimaced - Blaze was a much more dangerous threat in the desert than Chillwater ice was, especially in a town as tightly packed as Meridian - but at least it wasn’t invisible. Fortunately, the Glinthawk had not targeted a particularly busy part of the city; if she could get it to retreat, and then hit the Blaze sac with fire, she and the city would not be in range of the resulting explosion.

A couple of soldiers had already engaged the machine, and had thankfully cleared the area of townspeople. She didn’t recognise any of them, but they recognised her, and immediately followed her orders to keep it busy. By the time she mounted her Strider and had gotten beneath the Glinthawk in the lower village, as many of the soldiers left up on the mesa were putting out fires as were engaged in combat with the machine.

Quickly as possible, she peppered the Glinthawk’s underside with arrows. The great bird screeched and spun in the air to face her, ignoring the soldiers in favour of attacking her before she could do any real damage to it. It swooped in fast, breathing a long stream of fire in its wake, and she pushed her Strider off in the opposite direction at full speed. The wind whipped through her hair and she struggled to both keep her bow steady and the Strider on course, the Glinthawk gaining on her with every second. She fumbled with her Blaze-dipped arrows and had to halt the Strider in order to light one, and she ducked just in time to avoid getting her head cleaved off of her shoulders by the Glinthawk’s wings. It screeched again, louder. Aloy squinted against the ringing in her ears, and more of her regular arrows bounced straight off of the Glinthawk’s polished body, pushing it further out of the village. It shook itself in the air and flew straight for her again.

The machine was fast, but she was accurate. Flying straight toward her as it was, it only took a couple of flaming arrows to hit it square in its Blaze sac. The volatile liquid exploded, enveloping the machine in a bursting ball of flame. It fell hard to the desert ground, miraculously outside of the village boundary.

Aloy breathed hard and glanced into the sky; Glinthawks didn’t usually attack alone. She spent a couple of minutes throwing Chillwater grenades to quell the flames before they could destroy anything useful, while she waited for its brothers to exact revenge. She couldn’t see anything with naked eye or with her Focus, and when it was clear that there would be no follow-up attacks, she gingerly dismounted the Strider, heavily favouring her sore injured leg.

For all intents and purposes, the downed machine looked exactly as she would expect a dead Glinthawk to look, if it had been set on fire. Looking closely revealed more telltale clues toward its brand new ability; its throat cables were thicker, made of the same flame-resistant material that she had seen on Fire Bellowbacks, and the new Blaze sac itself looked like it had also come from a Bellowback. Aloy knew plenty of people who tinkered with machines and machine parts, but she had never seen anything as sophisticated as this Glinthawk was. This wasn’t the work of someone who was bored and wanted to cause chaos; this had been designed from the ground-up.

“Are the cauldrons doing this?” she murmured under her breath, frowning as she ran her hand over the dead machine, still warm from the fire, the melted Chillwater pooling beneath it.

The machine wasn’t forthcoming with answers, and she was still mulling over it all when she returned to the city. All of the fires had been successfully extinguished, with no lasting damage. The soldiers Aloy had left to occupy the machine were all a little bit singed, and Talanah had a long smear of soot on her cheek. Nobody had died, which was a huge relief, but Aloy still couldn’t shake the thoughts digging into her brain like parasites.

If the cauldrons were making the machines this way, did that mean that Hephaestus - which was temperamental on its best days - had been tampered with? Was Aloy to blame for the deaths dealt by these new machines, for not fixing GAIA soon enough?

Erend waved his gloved hand in front of her face and she blinked, jerked out of her thoughts.

“The others have gone back to the pub,” he said. Aloy looked around in surprise; the soldiers had all disappeared. When had that happened? “Let’s get your leg checked out.”

Aloy looked down. Her wound had reopened around the stitches, and blood was dripping down onto the Strider. She hadn’t even noticed how much it hurt.

“Great,” she said sarcastically, “I always thought this thing looked too cuddly,” she joked, patting the Strider’s neck. Erend huffed and shook his head, the corners of his mouth turned up at the edges. He tied her Strider to its metal ring and, when she started to move awkwardly, helped her dismount. Aloy, again distracted by her ruminating thoughts, let Erend lead her back to the palace in relative silence. He kept shooting her concerned sideways looks, and she offered him an apologetic smile - she knew what she looked like; limping, not talking, initially forgetting to moor her Strider outside of the city so that it didn’t spook people. She’d be concerned for him too, if it was the other way around.

“You holding up okay?” he finally asked, after a few hundred yards of her increasingly faltering limp. Aloy nodded, her eyebrows furrowed and teeth clenched. Her skin was covered in a light sheen of sweat, and every step was more painful than the last. Erend cursed her bullheadedness and wrapped his arm around her waist, taking some of her weight. Aloy gripped his opposite shoulder and gasped with relief, the pain mostly alleviated.

“You’re sure it was just a bandit that did this to you?”

Aloy’s fingers dug into Erend’s padded shoulder. “He was armoured like a Carja soldier. He had a spear.”

“Ouch,” Erend winced, “good thing he just hit you in the leg.”

Aloy opened her mouth to argue that, honestly, she would have preferred _just_ getting hit in the _nothing_ , but the look on Erend’s face brought her up short. In the darkness of the evening, and the flickering light of the outdoor lamps, the deep shadows under his eyes were thrown into sharp contrast. The image he had presented that afternoon conjured itself fresh in her mind - how he had been bent over the map and staring at it unblinkingly, moving the same groups of soldiers back and forth, his muscles tense with frustration. Even his behaviour at the tavern had been far more subdued than Aloy had come to expect from him; while he had gotten much better at not overdoing his drink, it was still out of character for him to be there half the night and maintain a completely clear head.

Not for the first time that evening, Aloy was forced to consider the fact that the situation might be more serious than she had first thought.

She shut her mouth.

“What do you think is going on?” Erend asked finally, when they were sat alone in a room in the infirmary. Aloy sighed and leaned back against the wall, frowning. She was on a patient’s cot, her leg stretched out in front of her with her leggings bunched up beneath it to catch the blood. Erend was beside her, perched uncomfortably in a rickety old chair that made terrible noises every time he moved. His arms were draped across his knees, his hands clasped together, and his grey eyes were focused on her. She wondered, for a moment, if he was looking so intently at her face so that he wouldn’t have to look at her bare legs instead. The wound was red, ragged, and angry-looking; she didn't want to look at it either.

“I’m not entirely sure,” she said finally, “it was odd enough for a Glinthawk to attack on its own, and that’s not counting the Blaze sac.” Aloy chewed her lip for a moment, mentally reviewing her conversation in the Trophy room. “Talanah said this kind of thing has been happening for a while.”

Erend nodded in the affirmative, “This is probably the sixth attack so far, in three or four weeks,” he said, “luckily they all seem to be happening around Meridian; if it was widespread it might be more of an issue.”

Aloy’s eyes narrowed. Something was at the back of her mind, on the tip of her tongue, but it kept slipping away from her. Erend looked as if he was about to say more, but the nursemaid chose that moment to re-enter the room. Efficiently, she removed Aloy’s hastily-sewn sutures from earlier in the day and passed Erend a damp cloth, instructing him to clean the wound while she readied her needle. Erend looked positively stricken, glancing between the cloth rag and Aloy’s leg. Aloy laughed at him and eventually took pity, cleaning the wound herself, her leg twitching and jerking as the muscle reacted reflexively to the pain. She understood why the nurse hadn’t given her the task in the first place - the cloth was drenched with more than just water, and it made the wound sting fiercely. Aloy hissed slowly through her teeth, and Erend’s seat creaked.

“I’d better go and report to Avad; he’s bound to have heard by now,” Erend said after a moment, “this is just a heads-up, but he’ll probably want to speak to you too, so try not to go too far.”

Aloy gestured to her leg, and the stitches she was in the middle of receiving, with a grimace.

“Done,” she remarked dryly. The nurse tied off another suture with a hard yank that had Aloy wincing. Once Erend had gone, the nurse tutted, and shook her head in amusement.

“I’ve seen that man get dragged in here with more injuries than I could count, and still he had a smile on his face. Give him a leg to clean up and he runs for the hills,” she said to Aloy, rolling her eyes. Aloy laughed, and the nurse turned a stern expression onto her, “You’re to keep off of this leg for _at least_ a day.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Aloy replied, not meeting her gaze. The nurse gave her a critical sideways glance, and clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

“I know you’re going to ignore every word and jump straight back on that machine of yours anyway. Don’t come to me when you pull the stitches out again.”

Aloy nodded innocently and sat back on the cot. Mentally, she was already on her way to the nearest cauldron.


	5. Five

Erend was entirely right about Avad wanting to speak to Aloy.

Erend was also entirely smug about it, and also entirely enjoying her complete exasperation with the tedium of court procedure. Aloy knew for a fact that most of his teasing was because he hated all of airs and graces of the court as much as she did; at least she didn’t have to deal with Avad daily (or, apparently, twice a day).

“They invented that rule because of you, you know,” Erend said conversationally, as they walked towards the sunny terrace. Aloy, with a sullen expression on her pink, freshly scrubbed face, rolled her eyes.

“What, I stunk up the Royal Cushions one too many times?” she asked sarcastically, “thanks, that was definitely something I needed to be aware of.”

“At least you were allowed to keep your clothes this time,” he said, glancing down at her bandaged leg, “bloodstains and all. I can’t believe Abi didn’t burn those on sight.”

“I may have threatened some servants,” Aloy admitted with a sly grin, “it was either that or have this meeting naked.”

Erend made a noise like he was choking. Marad, who had that moment arrived to escort them, gave him an odd look, and Aloy bit her lip to keep from laughing.

They were shown to the terrace overlooking the desert, the plush seating cast into cool shade. It was only midmorning, but the temperature was already climbing, and Aloy was sweating under her collar. It didn’t help that she was feeling particularly antsy; she had been ready to leave for cauldron Rho when the messenger arrived to summon her to the palace, and everything had taken so long since then. Next to her on the bench seat, Erend shifted around a few times, rolling his shoulders. At least it wasn’t just Aloy feeling uncomfortable.

“How's the leg?” Erend asked, once Marad had disappeared again, dipping his head toward her. Aloy stretched her bandaged leg out in front of her and wiggled her toes inside her boot.

“I've had worse,” she said lightly, “it's nothing that charging across the desert won't fix.”

Erend shook his head. He was smiling, but his eyes were downcast. His expression, when he finally did make eye-contact again, was unreadable.

“Just… look after yourself, okay?”

Aloy smiled. “I always do.”

Erend's eyes flicked down to her leg again, his brows furrowed, and he nodded. He folded his thick arms across his chest, and his foot started bouncing.

Avad appeared, followed by Marad and a servant carrying a large, fabric-covered hoop, which he was fanning Avad with. Avad sat across from Aloy and Erend and waved his servant away.

“Aloy,” Avad greeted warmly, “it’s good to see you. You look well.”

“Uh, thanks,” she said haltingly, shifting her injured leg back underneath her seat, “you too.”

Avad nodded, satisfied, even with her awkwardness. “Erend, how go the plans to re-fortify the village?”

Aloy turned her head to look at Erend while he replied. He was visibly tense, his hands in fists atop his thighs.

“Some Thrushes from the Hunters Lodge have signed up to join the Vanguard, but they need training, and I can’t spare the men to do it. If Balahn can send some of his men to help protect the city for a week or two, it’ll work.”

Avad nodded once at Marad, who stepped away. “It is done,” Avad said to Erend, “and what of the machines?”

Erend shared a glance with Aloy. “Nothing more since the Glinthawk last night.”

“This is the first time one has attacked the city directly, unprovoked,” Avad stated, steepling his fingers together in front of his face. Erend talked Aloy through all of the previous attacks, including the one that had unseated Talanah as Sunhawk.

“The first couple were small-fries, nothing more than Watchers with two heads, or a Grazer with vessels of Chillwater that it couldn’t use,” he explained, “that Stalker that Talanah showed you was the first one that killed any of ours, and the ones since then have been almost as nasty.”

“We couldn’t uncover anything that points toward the perpetrator,” Avad added, “we were hoping to get your insight, Aloy. Is there anything you can tell us that might help?”

Aloy considered all they had said for a moment. A chilly breeze picked up, and her skin prickled with goosebumps. A Watcher saw her hiding behind a tree near Rost’s home.

“You said last night that it wasn’t widespread,” she said to Erend, when the thing at the back of her mind, the thing that had been on the tip of her tongue all of the previous evening, finally became clear to her, “but it _is_ widespread. I fought a Watcher in the Embrace a couple of weeks ago that had a scanner, like a Scrapper’s.”

“In the Embrace?” Erend repeated, eyes wide, and shook his head in disbelief, “shit. I didn’t think it’d gone that far.”

“I didn't either. I didn't even realise what it was until just now.”

“You're sure it was a Watcher, and not another machine, that had the scanner?” Marad interjected. Aloy frowned, and lifted her chin.

“There wasn't anything else around, and they're pretty hard to get mixed up,”

Avad held a hand up to silence Marad, who had opened his mouth to respond. “That is a worry,” he said. Aloy stopped glaring at Marad, and shifted restlessly in her seat.

“I have an idea of a way to fix this,” Aloy promised, “but there's something I need to take a look at first, before I can be certain.”

“Good,” Avad nodded, “if that’s everything, and Aloy is all up to speed,” he looked to the two others, who didn’t have anything to add, “don’t let us keep you any longer.”

Aloy eagerly excused herself. When she was halfway back down the walkway, she heard Erend calling after her.

“I won’t keep you,” he promised when he drew level with her, shielding his eyes from the sun, “but I've got a favour to ask.”

 

* * *

 

The jungle was stiflingly humid that afternoon, and the sheen of sweat that had formed beneath Aloy’s collar up at the palace quickly became a full-body affair, with her hair and clothes sticking uncomfortably to her skin. Not for the first time that day, she muttered some choice words under her breath about dealing with kings - although, she could no longer deny that she had thoroughly needed the bath she had been forced into.

Thankfully, the favour Erend needed of her didn't derail her plans too much. Vern had gone to Erend the previous evening, after he had taken Aloy to the infirmary, to request a leave of absence. He wanted to meet his child, and see Mera again. With the machines changing, and with the Nora _not_ changing, Erend asked Aloy to accompany Vern safely through the Embrace. Seeing as Aloy needed to return to Teersa anyway - to tell her the truth about the supposed Carja pressure on the border - she agreed to do it. The only stipulation was that Vern was to meet her at Daytower, after she had had time to run an errand of her own.

Aloy slowed the Strider down the nearer she got to the cauldron. In the couple of years since her previous excursion into the last remains of the Metal World, it had become even more overgrown. As she neared the start of the cavern, Aloy dismounted her Strider. Slowly and carefully, she approached the edge of the cliff.

There was a single Watcher patrolling the restored entrance to the cauldron below. From its body protruded two long necks with a head atop each one. Its patrol path was erratic, and unpredictable even with her Focus. Inhaling, she drew a pair of arrows with her bow, and the Watcher fell dead on the ground before she'd finished breathing out again.

Aloy shimmied down the cavern wall, and dropped into a crouch at the bottom. Her Focus wasn't picking up anything, human or machine, and so Aloy walked carefully over the bridge of cables and stuck her spear into the cauldron door. It opened jerkily, and a wave of cold air rushed out to meet her. Aloy trotted into the heart of the cauldron, thankfully not encountering anything worse than the two-headed Watcher at the door. Even the belly of the beast, where she had fought the ferocious Snapmaw, was relatively deserted, and the column that had raised for her before stood quiet and unguarded.

Aloy circled the cavernous chamber. Bits of machine scrap were still scattered around, and she nudged through it all with her toe. They were likely the same machines that she had downed the first time she made her way through the cauldron- no mutations to be seen. She blew out a stream of air and put her hands on her hips.

A glint in the shadows caught her eye, and she strode purposefully towards it. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she recognised the triangular outline of a door - one that she hadn't gone through before. She dug her spear into the contact and spun the digital dials until the red disappeared, and the door unlocked.

The door made a loud, long screech of a noise that had Aloy grimacing and covering her ears. The voice that the doors had used before to greet her was garbled, speaking gibberish at her, and a red beam of light flashed onto her for a blink of a second before disappearing again. The door allowed her through anyway, but stopped before it was all the way open.

“That doesn't seem right,” Aloy muttered to herself as she squeezed through the gap.

The room she found herself in was much like many of the other Bunkers she had explored. There was a row of tables, upon which sat strange little boxes covered in flickering lights. There was a large space at the end, with another table in front of it. When Aloy approached, the voice screeched robotically at her again, and an image projected itself before her.

“ _Use keyboard_ ,” she read aloud. Beneath the words was a picture of a slab covered in squares. Frowning, Aloy looked again at the table, searching for something that looked like the image in the projection. She shifted the stacks of notes and paper that littered the tabletop and, finally, came across something that looked like the image.

It was made of a strange, lightweight black material, covered in small protruding squares. When she pressed one of them, the projected image changed.

“ _‘To use keyboard, press any key_ ,’” Aloy muttered under her breath. Her expression brightened, “huh. _Keyboard_. A board with keys on it. Makes sense,” she glanced again at the keyboard, “so which key is the ‘any’ key?”

Each key had a different symbol on it - symbols that Aloy recognised from the written data files she had recovered - but none of them said ‘any’. After a moment, she shrugged, and tapped the largest key, sat near to the centre.

Lines and lines of data appeared on the projection, letters and whole words completely foreign to her, scrolling past faster than she could read. She recognised some symbols but others were just lines and dots and squiggles and empty boxes. The mechanical narration filled her ears, speaking gibberish in three different voices at once. Aloy gripped the edge of the table and glared at the never-ending stream of nonsense words. She needed it to stop. She needed to think!

Aloy growled wordlessly and thumped the keyboard with her fist. For a second, everything went quiet. Then,

 _“Complete shutdown initiated,”_ the emotionless voice announced.

“What? No, don't do that!” Aloy exclaimed. She hit the keyboard again, hoping it would reverse whatever she had done. Around her, every glowing screen switched off, and Aloy was plunged into darkness.

“Shit!” she swore emphatically. She tried pressing a few more buttons on the keyboard, but without anything to see by, she had no idea what she was even trying to do. The room was eerily quiet without the whirring of the machine in front of her. Her heart thudded in her chest.

Something moved in the cavern behind her, and Aloy suddenly found herself bathed in red light. She grabbed her spear and spun on her heels, brandishing it in front of her. The machine stood across from her was tremendously bulky, and stood as tall as a Trampler. Under the multiple layers of reinforced metal, it was a Ravager built for war. Fighting it in such close quarters was going to be impossible; the only choice she had was to run.

It charged for her and sliced its massive paws through the air. She ducked and darted forwards, sprinting as fast as her injured leg would allow. The machine had difficulty with the narrow corridor - just as she had hoped - but back in the heart of the cauldron, it was a different story. She turned just in time to dodge another swipe, but the machine wasn't aiming for her head.

White-hot pain enveloped her leg. Aloy cried out and hit the metal floor hard, all of the breath whooshing out of her. She lay on the cold floor, writhing. It felt like her leg had been cleaved right off. She grabbed at the wound with her hand. Relief cleared the fog of pain for a moment - her leg was hot and wet with blood, but still _there_.

Aloy scrambled to her feet to get out of the way of the Ravager’s cannon blast, her injured leg numb and sluggish. She staggered across the floor as it heaved and whirled beneath her. Blue light flashed all around, and for a second after all she saw was black.

She blinked hard, and pried her eyes open- her back was stinging fiercely, and she felt the cold Metal of the floor on her cheek. The floor vibrated once, twice. Aloy rolled and held her spear - _how_ had she kept hold of her spear? - aloft, her arm trembling feebly, pain lancing across her back.

The giant Ravager stood over her, and with another swipe hit the spear from her hands. Her arm smacked against the floor and she gave another broken cry, pushing herself back and away from the machine. It towered above her, its eyes glowing red.

Aloy's chest heaved, her vision swam and fringed black. Her fleet slipped on the floor, and the hand she had gripped her leg with lost its grip and slipped too. Unable to support herself she dropped back, fighting against the pull of unconsciousness.

How much blood had she lost?

The thing above her growled, a guttural noise made of metal. Fear clawed at her, keeping her awake - but not awake enough. She worked her mouth, feeling oddly disconnected from her own body. She tried to make a sound, a word, a whistle, anything!

Aloy could barely breathe, was so dizzy she could barely see, and then-

Nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll try and not make the wait for the next couple of chapters too long, but I'm gonna have to do like a lot of pre-modern medical research to figure out how Aloy's gonna stay alive (it's not really a spoiler my dudes; she's the protagonist) and how injured I can almost-realistically have her.


	6. Six

For a while, she drifts.

Colours bleed through her vision.

Reds…

Browns...

Yellows...

She feels like she's weightless and suffocating, all at once. Like she's underwater.

Someone's saying her name, and for a moment, she almost…

Almost-

 

* * *

 

“How did you do that?”

Erend looked up from his kill, squinting at her through the sunlight. Beneath his fingers, the fallen Broadhead was covered in a thin film of frost that was already melting in the midday heat.

“What? Freeze it?”

She nodded rapidly, eager and wide-eyed. He pulled a cloth bundle from his knapsack, and unwrapped it carefully. Inside was a vessel of Chillwater.

“You've been getting Chillwater from the machines you drop, right? Well, you just…” he gripped it in both hands, grunted, and twisted it open. The vessel split into four self-contained segments, and Erend carefully worked one loose, “you want to attach one of these near the head of your arrow.”

“Won’t that mess the balance up?” Aloy wondered aloud, while Erend attached the glass segment to one of his arrows.

Erend snorted, “Like you wouldn’t believe.” He flipped the arrow around to show her the end, which was capped with iron. “Counter-weight,” he explained. He passed her the finished arrow, which she turned over and over in her hand.

“I wouldn’t bother trying to shoot it from your regular bow, there,” he said, nodding at the bow strapped to her back, “you’ll need something with much more power to get these babies flying.”

Aloy gestured to his bow, which he had propped up against an overturned log. “Can I try?”

Erend shrugged, and went back to building a campfire. Aloy bit the inside of her cheek. He had been brooding for their whole journey - which was very much understandable; the man had just buried his sister - and for a minute there, Aloy thought she’d managed to bring him out of his gloom. Maybe a good distraction would help? It sure had done wonders for her own-- _don’t think about it._

With her shoulders squared, Aloy strode purposefully over to his bow and lifted it with slight difficulty; it was much heavier than she had expected it to be. She used the tips of her fingers to test the resistance in the taut string, and drew the freshly-made freeze arrow in one smooth motion.

“What should I hit?” she asked, narrowing her eyes and looking down the line of fire. Erend called over to say that as long as it wasn’t _him_ ; he didn’t care.

There was a Snapmaw lazing by the edge of the winding desert river. With the aid of her Focus, and in one devastating shot, Aloy ruptured the sac in its gullet, triggering an explosion of ice which instantly froze the machine solid. Just as she had watched Erend do with the Broadhead, she finished it off with regular arrows, each one doing considerably high amounts of damage to the Snapmaw’s brittle frozen components.

Aloy grinned with self-satisfaction, and turned back to Erend to share in her victory. He was staring straight up at her, his light-coloured eyes shadowed and dark, and she snapped her mouth shut.

“What?” she asked defensively. After a moment, Erend shook his head, and replied in a faraway voice.

“Nothing.”

For a moment, Aloy watched Erend curiously as he continued to stare at her. Then, a glint of light caught her eye- a machine, not too far away.

“Woah,” she exclaimed in a hushed breath, “big guy.”

Erend stoked the campfire, apparently unconcerned. “That's a Ravager,” he said lightly. He hadn't even turned to look.

“No,” Aloy disagreed, “that's _bigger_ than a Ravager. You might wanna move; it's coming this way,”

“They're not real,” he said. He stoked the fire again.

“What are you- it's _right there!_ ” Aloy pointed at it. Erend didn't turn to look. Exasperated, Aloy shook her head and stomped toward him, grabbing the open vessel of Chillwater up from the ground. “Pass me some of your arrows, Erend _._ ” He was outright ignoring her now. The giant Ravager had spotted them, and was prowling from side to side, parallel with where he sat. Panic started to rise in Aloy’s chest. “ _Erend!”_ she shouted urgently.

 _“Stop telling stories,_ Aloy _!”_ he snapped.

The Ravager started to charge. Aloy fumbled with the Chillwater, and lobbed it at the Ravager. It jumped over Erend, the Chillwater glancing ineffectively off of its side, and landed straight on top of Aloy. Her back seared with pain and she screamed. She tried to shove the machine off of her, and it felt warm and soft under her hands. Suddenly, it wasn't a Ravager holding her down- it was Rost. Rost, who had raised her and taught her to fight and to survive and then died for her.

“Snap out of it!” he yelled. The Ravager was gone. Her chest heaved, her blood racing with adrenaline.

She was in so much pain.

Aloy stopped trying to push Rost away and grabbed for him instead. Immediately his arms encircled her, and sharp pain lanced across every inch of her skin. She whimpered, and then, pressing her face into the flesh of his throat, cried. With each racking sob came more pain, and her own ears rang with the anguished noise she was making.

“Have you got anything that _won't_ make her dream?” Rost asked, his voice sounding low and bitter. She sniffled wetly, and tried to ask him what he meant. She was so thirsty.

“Drink this. It’ll help you sleep.”

 _“No_ ,” Aloy whispered. If she slept, he would leave her again.

“Please, Aloy,” Rost begged. He sounded so sad.

Something was pressed to her mouth, and she drank.

The last thing she remembered, before falling back into unconsciousness, was the smell of leather, and desert sand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is purposefully short, and purposefully a little bit confusing and mismatched, in terms of tenses and situations, and Aloy's reactions. Hopefully the reason is clear.  
> I like the idea that Erend is the one that first showed Aloy freeze arrows, seeing as he uses them almost exclusively for ranged combat in the game and his quest is relatively early-on.
> 
> Edit: I don't think that what Erend does in this hallucination/flashback counts as Gaslighting, but if anybody is affected by it, please let me know so that I can add the appropriate warning. I can be contacted on tumblr @spooopygames. This goes for _anything_ that affects anybody that wasn't appropriately tagged or warned; you can definitely come and tell me off for it.


	7. Seven

Aloy blearily opened her eyes. Wherever she was was dark, and stuffy. Her eyes itched, and her mouth was dry. She lifted her arm to rub her face, and cried out loudly at the pain that shot from her elbow to her shoulder. Aloy kept her arm as still as possible, pressed against her side and curled over her belly, breathing quickly through her clenched teeth. It was like a switch had been flipped; becoming aware of the pain in her arm brought all of her other aches and pains to the surface. Her back stung and tingled like she was inside a nest of ants, her face felt several sizes too small for her skin, and her leg-

Her leg was nothing but a lead weight on her pelvis.

She was lying on her side, and she couldn't turn back over. Her head felt like it was made of soup, and her tense muscles started to shake and quiver from being held stiff for so long. Breathing hard, she blinked rapidly, trying to keep her vision focused for long enough to figure out where she was. With difficulty, she made out yellow walls, and a narrow window framed with thin red curtains. The curtains were drawn, and even the small amount of light that still shone through them was enough to hurt Aloy’s sensitive eyes.

Biting her lip and gritting her teeth against the pain, she pushed herself up slowly on her one free arm; the injured one was in a splint, and wrapped tightly in bandages. The thin blanket covering her up slid down her torso and she swallowed hard, whimpering in the back of her throat. Even that small amount of friction was incredibly uncomfortable.

The door opened at the end of the room, and someone gasped.

“Get back down, girl!” they exclaimed, rushing over to her bedside. Aloy looked at their face, and felt a spark of recognition that she couldn't place in the tumultuous ocean of mismatched thoughts and memories in her brain. The person was still talking to her, their words passing over her like the wind.

The person - the nurse - sighed, and carefully eased Aloy back down onto the bed. Slowly, bits and pieces started to make sense again.

“What happened?” Aloy croaked, after she had gasped wordlessly, and been helped to drink some water. The nurse, sat by her bed, was holding a perspiring mug in one hand, and the fingers of her other one were carefully brushing away the hair stuck to Aloy’s forehead.

“They told me you were found half-dead in the desert, not far from Daytower,”

“Who?”

“One of the Vanguard- Vern. When they managed to stop the bleeding, they moved you here,” she explained. Aloy opened her mouth again to ask another question, but the nurse interrupted her, “you're in the palace infirmary, in Meridian.”

Bits and pieces started to fit together in Aloy’s mind. The nurse before her was the same nurse who had redone the stitches on her leg. She had gone to cauldron Rho, and she had been overpowered. Her memory filled with red light, and she swallowed hard.

The door across the room opened again.

“Sorry it took so long, Abi, but they were out of the beef liver, and had to make more,” the pretty woman apologised. In her hands was a steaming bowl of something - presumably liver - the smell of which made Aloy’s stomach grumble. The woman looked at Aloy and beamed, gasping, “you're awake!”

“Put it down over there, Talanah,” the nurse instructed, “Aloy, I'm going to change the bandages on your leg, then we’ll get you sitting up again to eat.”

Aloy tried to nod, but the jerking motion jarred her back further, and she hissed with the sharp shock of pain she received. The nurse tutted, and pulled the blanket the rest of the way off of Aloy. Aloy craned her neck as carefully as possible - her leg was thankfully still there, wrapped from thigh to calf in sun-bleached cotton. A considerable length of it had small spots of blood seeping through. The nurse unwrapped layer after layer, gently tugging it off of where blood had dried through the bandage and stuck it to her leg. The spots of blood Aloy saw grew larger with each layer that was peeled away. The nurse paused before removing the final layer.

“They cauterised it in Daytower, to stem the bleeding. It's still healing; it looks a lot worse than it is.”

“Why’sit numb?” Aloy asked. Her mouth hadn't wanted to cooperate with her brain, but luckily she wasn't slurring too badly.

“That'll be the ointment,” the nurse said, “don't worry, girl, when it wears off, you'll be glad it was there in the first place.”

With another careful tug, the bandage was removed. Part of Aloy didn't want to look, but the other part had to, out of morbid curiosity.

It wasn't as bad as she feared. As the nurse had warned, the wound had been cauterised, and the healing burn stretched down the side of her thigh. The burn itself was probably as wide as her thumb at the widest part, and as long as her hand, though the whole wound - particularly the part that had been caused by the bandit in Carja armour - stretched higher. Luckily, even though the wound continued on her calf, that part of it was smaller, and had been stitched up instead of cauterised. The whole thing had already formed a long scab, and miraculously, her knee had been completely spared.

The nurse dabbed some salve onto the wound - vaguely, Aloy thought she felt it sting - and wrapped it back up with less layers of cotton than she had taken off, explaining that it was healing well, and didn't need to be wrapped up so much any more.

“Aloy?” Talanah said tentatively. She was sat on the seat next to the bed, the steaming bowl still in her hands, “how do you feel?”

Aloy frowned and licked her lips. “Sore,” she replied, with a quirk of her mouth. Truthfully, Aloy felt like she was a massive bruise. Talanah smiled.

“I'll bet,”

“Talanah, put the bowl down and help me move her,” the nurse said. Aloy jutted her chin out and tried to sit up and move herself, but again, pulled the injury on her back and gasped in pain.

“That's what you get for being as stubborn as a boar,” the nurse chastised, “stop moving; you'll pull your stitches and start bleeding again.”

Talanah, under the nurse’s instruction, carefully helped Aloy sit up, and then replaced her back against the pillows which had been piled up behind her. She was still reclined, but much less so. They actually let her lie on her back, after the nurse had poked around behind her and pronounced that her wounds were healing well over there, too. Talanah held the bowl again, and stirred the liquid broth it held. Aloy reached for the spoon, but her weak arm wobbled so much that she couldn't grasp it properly, and she narrowly avoided spilling boiling water on herself. Like she needed another burn.

Aloy blinked back her frustrated tears, and tried not to feel too humiliated when Talanah had to spoon-feed her. Refusing to let herself be fed like an infant wasn't an option; she was ravenous, and the smell of the broth in the bowl was making her hungrier.

“What do you remember?” Talanah asked, when Aloy had had as much of the meaty broth as she could stomach.

“It's patchy,” Aloy admitted. She felt much better having eaten, even though it wasn't much. The swimming in her head had lessened, and talking was a lot easier, “I remember going into the cauldron, and getting in a fight. I don't remember how I got out.”

Talanah nodded, studying her hands.

“Vern said that after you didn't show up at Daytower for the whole afternoon, he went to go look for you. He didn't go far before he found you, in the desert on your Strider, unconscious. He said that if you hadn't used machine cables as a tourniquet, you probably would have-” Talanah trailed off, swallowing hard. She wiped her eyes with a hand.

“I don't remember doing that,” Aloy murmured, eyebrows knitted together.

“Well, I'm glad you did,” Talanah stated emphatically. She looked at Aloy with red-rimmed eyes, “I'm so glad you did.” Her face crumpled, and she hung her head. Her hands clenched into fists, her shoulders shaking. Aloy reached feebly for her, pulled her in close despite the sting in her wounds. Talanah sobbed in her arms. Aloy remembered her dream with  startling clarity, and swallowed back her own tears.

 

* * *

 

 

News spread quickly in a town like Meridian.

It had been late afternoon when Aloy first woke up, and between many short spells of falling asleep again, she managed to see most of her friends who had stopped by to visit.

After dinner - more meat broth, that she actually managed to feed to herself, however slowly - Abi the nurse removed the bandages wrapped around her torso. Aloy had been hit at close range by the Ravager, and her back was dotted with oval-shaped welts. They were all healing incredibly well, and were already covered with fully-formed scabs. The arm that had gotten smacked against the floor had been fractured, and was in a splint, and she had a nasty bruise on her jaw that Abi said was already going green. With all the blood she had lost, Aloy realised she probably looked like death warmed up.

“How long have I been out?” Aloy asked Abi tentatively, while more of the stinging salve was dabbed onto her back.

“Including today, and the time between here and Daytower, I'd say about thirteen days,”

Aloy exhaled, and closed her eyes in relief. Two weeks was a long time, but it was still less time than she’d feared she’d lost.

“How long before I can leave?” she asked, while Abi draped a loose tunic over her head and helped feed her fractured arm through the hole.

Abi raised her eyebrow at Aloy, “You nearly puked when we sat you up not three hours ago, and you think you're ready to leave?”

Aloy glared at the side of Abi’s head, “I have things that I need to get done.”

“You have healing that you need to get done,” Abi retorted. She eased Aloy back onto the pillows again, “I warned you about your leg, and you didn’t listen. This time you’re staying for as long as your body needs.”

Aloy scowled at the ceiling while Abi shuffled around the room. Exhaustion soon caught up with her again, and every time she blinked it was harder to pry her eyes back open.

“I wouldn’t worry about anything you’ve got to get done,” Abi said, her tone much softer than it had been, “it looks like whatever you did worked.”

“What do you mean?” Aloy eventually managed to ask. Her mouth was sluggish, her speech slurred.

Aloy fell asleep before she heard Abi’s answer, and when she pried her eyes open again, the room was bathed in darkness, a single candle flickering in a wall sconce. Her back was stinging something fierce, and with some effort she wriggled until she was lying on her side again. She huffed out a long breath and lay still, listening to the sound of the ever-awake city. All of the noise had been the reason she couldn’t live in Meridian - and she had tried, years ago - but tonight, hearing ordinary people going about their lives without so much as a worry was soothing to her.

She was drifting off again when the room grew suddenly lighter, and door creaked as it opened. A large figure stepped through.

“Damn, you must be asleep again,” he muttered, and Aloy turned her head, blinking blearily at the figure.

“Erend?” she murmured. Erend’s silhouette paused, bathed in the warm light from the corridor.

“Shit, did I wake you up?” he cursed. Tiredly, she grinned at him.

“It’s fine, I’m sure I’ll drop off again soon enough.”

Erend shifted from foot to foot by the door, rubbing his neck. He looked as exhausted as she felt.

“Can I-” he gestured to the vacant chair beside her bed, “I mean, if you need to rest I can leave, that’s not-”

“Erend,” Aloy interrupted, “please will you sit with me for a minute?”

Erend strode the length of the room in four long steps and sat carefully down in the wooden chair. It creaked worryingly when he moved to put his hand on the bed beside hers.

“What,” he asked with a cheeky grin, “you haven’t got _two_ minutes for me anymore?”

“I probably won’t stay awake that long,” Aloy said, yawning widely as if to prove her point. She took his hand and squeezed it feebly. Erend smiled, his eyes shining in the dark. Aloy repeated Abi’s earlier comment - that whatever Aloy had done had worked - back to him, and immediately, his entire demeanor seemed to lift. He nodded, and squeezed back.

“We fought a Thunderjaw in the usual place on our way up to Daytower to fetch you,” he explained, “on the way back, it was still dead. Nothing had come back to replace it.” Erend trailed off, his eyebrows furrowed, absently stroking her knuckles with the rough pad of his thumb. Aloy waited patiently, and tugged on his hand when he had paused for too long.

“You okay?” she asked in a hushed voice. Erend laughed.

“Pretty sure I should be the one asking _you_ that,” he said with a fond smile. She tugged his hand again, demanding a real answer. He shrugged, “It’s been a rough couple of weeks. We weren’t even sure that you would survive the journey from Daytower, so, uh-” he cleared his throat and nodded vigorously, “that Thunderjaw being gone was the best news we could’ve hoped for.

“When we got back to Meridian, there were reports of the same thing happening with the known Stormbird sites. People brought the birds down, and they weren't being replaced. They’ve _still_ not been replaced. The mutant machines aren’t showing up anymore, either, so yeah,” he shrugged, “whatever you did must’ve worked.”

Erend was grinning broadly by the time he’d finished talking, and it was hard not to mirror him. She yawned again, deeper than before. When she opened her eyes, Erend was still watching her, still smoothing his thumb across the back of her hand.

“Get some rest. I’ve got a bone to pick with you, later.”

“Pick it with me now,” she said around another yawn, “you might have a chance of winning whatever argument it is.”

Erend chuckled.

“Fine. What happened to taking care of yourself?” he asked.

“I thought about it, but then I thought getting shredded by a huge Ravager was a better idea,” Aloy shot back sleepily. Erend huffed, and said something that she missed. She drifted for a moment, half-asleep and half-awake.

“Do you remember showing me how to make freeze arrows?” Aloy asked dreamily, her voice feather-light and thick with sleep. Erend’s chair creaked loudly, and he grunted, and Aloy got the impression she wasn't the only one dropping off.

“Yeah, after we found Ersa,” he breathed, “feels like it was decades ago.”

“I dreamed about it,” Aloy said, “but the Ravager attacked me again, and Rost was there…” her eyelids fluttered open. Erend’s expression was drawn, his eyes cast further into darkness. “I dreamed it was Rost that took care of me... but it was you, wasn’t it?” she asked. Erend’s thumb froze in its path across her hand. He didn’t answer, but really, he didn’t have to. Aloy hadn’t been even halfway lucid at the time, but she knew now that it was Erend who had protected her from her nightmare. It was Erend who had held her as she cried.

Aloy closed her eyes and sighed deeply, her head sinking further into her pillow.

“Thank you,” she whispered, succumbing once again to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Another week passed before Aloy could stand up without fainting.

Abi told her it was down to the speed that her body could replace all the blood she had lost. It was why all of her meals so far had involved meat in some way; to better help the replacement process. It didn’t, however, mean that she was any more physically independent; she couldn’t go very far without having to take a break, and she needed a crutch to help relieve the weight on her injured leg. Fortunately, her fractured arm had done the majority of its healing while she had been unconscious, and while it still felt oddly tight whenever she moved it, it had stopped hurting, and no longer needed to be kept in its sling. It made using the crutch a lot easier, and there was something to be said about being able to take yourself outside for a couple of minutes a day, just for a little sun and fresh air.

She was on her way to do just that when she almost hobbled straight into Dai and Galand, who both beamed when they saw her.

“Just the girl we were looking for,” Galand pronounced. Aloy shifted the crutch in her armpit and eyed them both warily.

“For what?”

“The Sun-King is about to give a speech,” Dai said, “we didn't think you'd want to miss it.”

On the contrary, there was probably nothing Aloy would like to miss _more._ She pointed this out to both of them, which just made them laugh while they steered her out into the midmorning sun and toward the Circle. At least neither of the men offered to carry her; Aloy was glad to keep what was left of her dignity.

The Circle was a round plateau at the foot of the Palace which could easily hold a few hundred people, if needed, where the King could be seen if he stood atop the Palace steps. It was already filling with people, and Aloy saw the necessity of being flanked by two giant treetrunks of men such as Dai and Galad; she wasn’t jostled or pushed even once. Galad cheekily offered to let Aloy sit on his shoulders to watch, and Dai shoved him hard for his trouble. By the time Avad took his place, followed by each of the military Captains, the plateau was rammed with bodies, and Aloy was sweating in the heat. She held on to Dai’s arm to keep herself from swaying, her legs already sore from standing.

“People of the Sundom,” Avad said, his voice naturally amplified in the public space. A hush fell over everybody present, their faces filled with awe and reverence.

Aloy found herself incredibly pleased to not be up on the platform as she studied the faces of the Captains that she didn't recognise, all of them looking slightly uncomfortable under the watchful gaze of the hot sun, and of what seemed like all of Meridian at once. Erend was stood on Avad’s right side, his expression carefully neutral. He had his hands clasped together behind his body, his chin lifted high as he looked out over the top of the audience. His cheeks were positively ruddy in the heat, his skin shining with a light sweat, and even though she felt a bit exposed in her cotton patient’s tunic and short trousers, Aloy really didn't envy Erend for having to wear his heavy armour during Avad’s speech.

Avad’s speech, which she was missing. Aloy dragged her gaze back over to the king.

“-Stormbirds in the south, and the Thunderjaws that lurk along the road to Daytower, have ceased to return once defeated.”

The onlookers around Aloy stated whispering delightedly to each other. Galand laid his hand on her shoulder and gave her a tiny, excited, shake. A few people in the crowd whooped and cheered, and Avad’s smile stretched across his face.

“With that, I am happy to announce to you all: the Derangement, which started almost twenty-five years ago, is finally over!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It actually killed me a little inside to have to use the US spelling of "hospitalisation" for the tags, but there you go.
> 
> Things were kind of really bad and now are looking up! Ain't it great? Don't you wish I was writing an omnipresent third person narrative so that we'd get to see Erend and Talanah trying to cope with Aloy nearly dying? I do.
> 
>  
> 
> ~~It might happen, give me a few days~~


	8. Eight

Aloy stood amongst the cheering crowd, under the hot Meridian sun, and felt like she had been doused with ice water. It hadn’t been until Avad’s declaration - until she again remembered the huge Ravager bearing down upon her - that she had recalled just  _ how _ the Derangement had ended. How she had broken the machine that controlled the Cauldron, and how the Cauldron had then gone dark. How she had so carelessly destroyed the hard work of Elisabet Sobek, and of all of the other Alphas.

For a moment she wavered, feeling as if she had been punched right in the gut, all of the air forced from her lungs.

“You okay there, Aloy?” someone near her asked. With some effort she focused on Dai, whose arm her fingernails were digging into. She breathed.

“I'm a little dizzy,” she answered, only half-lying. Whether it was the heat or her revelation, her vision had started to blend at the edges.

“Time to go back,” Galand suggested. Placidly, Aloy let the two of them guide her back to the infirmary, with Galand in front weaving their path through the crowd and Dai making sure Aloy didn't topple over. She ran her brain in rapid circles trying to figure out what she had done to damage the Cauldron so badly, but nothing became obvious to her.

Ultimately, by stopping the mutated machines from being produced so near to Meridian, she had achieved what she had set out to do. Perhaps she would have to look at the additional loss of the bigger war machines as the bonus that it was. Surely, without them, people would be much safer.

Surely, that should be enough for her.

* * *

 

Aloy shouldered open the door to the room where Erend worked with a laboured grunt. It swung open by about half a metre before stopping suddenly, and wouldn't open further when she tried shoving it. Erend's voice called out from within.

“Hang on a sec!”

There was a loud scraping sound, like something being dragged along the floor, followed by a lot of shuffling and thumping and occasionally an emphatic curse word. Aloy bit her lip to keep from grinning, and the door swung open the rest of the way. Erend stood in the doorway, looking a bit ruffled, and gave her a perplexed look.

“Shouldn't you be resting?” he asked.

“Hello to you too,” said Aloy, smirking. “Abi said I could take a walk around the palace, and this is technically within the palace, so...”

“That's a bit of a stretch, but okay.” Erend remarked with amusement. Aloy gestured into his office with a nod of her head.

“Can I come in?”

“Uh, sure,” Erend replied, moving aside so that she could hobble into the room, “watch your step; it's a bit-”

“Wow,” Aloy exclaimed, interrupting him. The previously tidy and orderly room was now strewn with scrolls and books, the bookshelves themselves empty, and the huge table with the map of Meridian on it was gone. “What happened in here?”

“Well,” said Erend, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. “I guess I'm reorganising,” he finally said, though it sounded like he'd only just come to that realisation himself. Aloy reseated the crutch under her arm.

“Need any help?” she offered. Erend eyed her critically, and Aloy lifted her chin a fraction.

“I'd prefer if you just sat,” he suggested, somewhat hesitantly. He moved past her and started clearing rubbish off of the only chair left in the room. Aloy narrowed her eyes at his back.

“I'm not made of wet paper,” she argued.

“I know that,” Erend said, not unkindly, “just humour me. It's too hot to carry you back to the infirmary; they'll be booking me in right next to you if I have to do it.”

Aloy huffed and plonked herself down in the chair, clenching her teeth to hide the fact that she'd jarred her leg by doing so. When the pain faded, she relaxed properly. The chair was wooden, but not rickety like the one that sat next to her bed in the infirmary, and it even had little arm rests, which she perched her elbows upon.

“So,” she started, lacing her fingers together across her stomach, “do you think that, maybe, Avad’s announcement was a little… premature?”

Erend paused, bent over a crate on the other side of the room. “There wasn’t much of a choice,” he said, “people were panicking about the machines changing, and getting into the city, and _then_ they started panicking about the machines _disappearing_. Best way to calm everybody down was to tell ‘em it was on purpose.”

“I… guess that makes sense,” Aloy commented measuredly, “but what happens when the Stormbirds and the Thunderjaws from the other Cauldrons start to appear, and everyone realises it was a lie?”

“I get your point, I do. But what if they  _ never  _ come back at all? Can you imagine what that would be like?” he countered, a huge, hopeful grin on his face. Aloy let her eyes fall from his, not wanting him to see how just how much she  _ had _ imagined what it would be like.

The whole night after Avad’s speech, she had lain awake in the sticky heat of her hospital room, trying to wrap her head around the damage she had caused. She had wiped out an entire Cauldron’s worth of machines - it was good that the war machines were gone from that side of Meridian, but that was also a fifth of all of the machines that were beneficial to their relatively tiny little stretch of habitable land - just  _ gone _ .

She had gone over and over it in her head, and eventually came to the conclusion that there were still enough machines left over for them to survive, so long as nothing happened to the other cauldrons. Logically, it was a loss, but part of her believed that the safe trade routes between Meridian and the Embrace were well worth it. The other part of her, however - the  _ bigger _ part of her - was tangled up in a guilt and fear that was entirely personal.

“I don't think I've ever seen you speechless before,” Erend remarked, pulling her from her reverie.  He was stood beside her, leafing through the documents on his work table. Aloy hadn't even noticed that he had been waiting for her to say something. She shook her head, and shrugged.

“I don't know what to say,” Aloy replied, after a moment. She felt like an Outcast all over again; everyone around her seemed jovial and optimistic, and she just wanted to stay in her bed all day. She groaned, dropping her head back against the chair, “now would be a really good time for some of that ale.”

Erend grimaced, and said, “‘Fraid there's none left,”

“Oh,” she replied, her eyebrows drawing together into a frown. “You didn't waste any time,” she remarked bluntly.

“You were out for two weeks, Aloy,” he pointed out, his voice solemn and hard, “I had _plenty_ of time.”

Aloy tensed up, guiltily dropping her eyes and assessing the healing wound peeking out from under her shorts. It still looked pretty red, and angry. She tugged the hem further down her thigh.

Erend sighed, and dropped the sheaves of paper he was holding back onto the desk.

“Sorry,” he said, “I shouldn't have- I'll make it up to you. For the ale, too.”

“It was a gift, don't worry about it,” Aloy insisted, lifting her chin to look him in the eye. She felt her irritation soften when she met his gaze, every inch of him looking strained and sorrowful. Guilt gnawed at her belly, and she swallowed hard before saying, “Talanah told me part of what happened while I was out. It sounds like it was... tough.”

A muscle in Erend’s neck jumped and the knot in his throat bobbed as he swallowed.

“It was,” Erend replied finally. He stood propped up by the table, his arms loose at his sides, his expression unguarded. It struck Aloy that there weren't many times that she hadn't seen him grinning, and apart from during the campaign against HADES, they had all happened in the last few weeks. She opened her mouth to say something - she wasn't sure what, exactly - when he continued, his voice thick. “It was tough _before_ you decided to get a fever on us. It was worse than the Red Raids,” he muttered, shaking his head, “at least with the Red Raids, I could _do_ something about it,”

Erend stared out of the window, eyes dark and eyebrows furrowed. He stood like that for a while, unmoving, unblinking. Aloy pushed herself up from the chair and stood shakily on her legs, crutch forgotten, and wound her arms around his shoulders, leaning her weight into him. He stood tense, unbreathing in her arms.

“You _did_ do something,” she reminded him, her forehead against his throat. After a long moment, during which Aloy started to feel a little bit awkward, he finally wrapped his arms around her in reciprocation, exhaling all of his held breath in one huff.

They stood that way for a while, and when Aloy finally pulled away, she saw the oddest look in Erend's eyes. He hadn't cried, unlike Talanah, but the sadness was less prominent, and Aloy believed he had at least made a start on the way to healing.

* * *

 

Aloy was confined to the palace for a few more days. She found she was able to move further every time, and after joining in the celebration feast with everyone in the palace, had gotten into the routine of taking her lunches with Avad and Itamen out on the veranda. Aloy felt a little bit like a loose end, spending as much of her time with whomever of her friends was free to do so, but it was better than being bored out of her skull. When she finally had Abi’s seal of approval that she could leave the palace, Aloy jumped at the chance, and immediately went in search of the first person who would leave the city with her, at least for a little while.

Talanah held the bow steady in her hand and drew two arrows together. She let them fly and they sliced through the air. One arrow thunked into the simple Watcher-shaped target at the end of the range, the other one sailing past and dropping into the sand.

Aloy squinted at it from where she sat on the sidelines, holding her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.

“Better,” she pronounced, “try holding them further apart.”

“ _Further_ apart?” Talanah repeated, “I'm not sure I have that much hand.”

Aloy snorted and popped another grape into her mouth. What had originally been an outdoor meal had quickly turned into training - not that Aloy really minded. She itched to be the one firing the arrows herself, but though her leg was well on its way to mending, she still wasn't much good at walking without her crutch to support her.

The wound on her thigh had formed into a thick and ugly scab, which she often found herself glaring at. All progress beyond the scab stage seemed to be nonexistent, and not much had happened with it in the time since Aloy had woken up. It still pulled when she moved, and still seared when she tried to wear anything longer than shorts on her legs, and the lack of physical activity was making her crabby. More than anything, she wanted to really get out of Meridian and see the extent of her meddling; were the war machines truly disappearing, like they said, or was it an exaggeration?

 

Talanah whooped loudly, snapping Aloy out of her thoughts. Both of the arrows had pierced the Watcher target this time; one in its eye stalk, the other in its side. Aloy grinned, clapping her hands, and Talanah bowed, laughing.

“We better get you back before you get a sunburn to add to your collection,” Talanah said, still beaming, after she had retrieved the arrows.

Aloy frowned, and tilted her head curiously, “You can get burns from the Sun?”

“Of course you can,” Talanah replied, helping pull Aloy up from her sitting position on the ground, “you don't have the Sun in the Sacred Lands?”

“No, we just have the Mother,”

Talanah laughed and gathered up the remains of their lunch. She shook out the blanket that had covered the hot sand, and flung the bag of supplies over her shoulder. Aloy held her hand out, intent on at least taking the blanket.

“I've got this,” said Talanah with a kind smile. Aloy faltered.

“I can carry _something_ ,” she insisted.

“Really, its fine,” Talanah repeated, and gestured toward the palace, “after you.”

Aloy narrowed her eyes at Talanah and stood her ground. Talanah stared back at her levelly, and shifted the bag on her shoulder.

“So, did you and Erend plan this together, or…?” Aloy asked, her jaw clenched. Talanah didn't answer her, so Aloy just rolled her eyes and hobbled back through the village toward the elevators. She heard Talanah’s footsteps behind her.

“I haven't spoken to Erend in more than a fortnight,” Talanah murmured, when they had gotten to the elevators and finally drawn level with each other again, “but it's not a bad thing that we're both looking out for you.”

Aloy tsked, and leaned against the railing. She didn't agree that Talanah and Erend needed to treat her like a child, but it was the first part of Talanah's statement that stood out to her the most.

“You're not talking to Erend?” she repeated questioningly. Talanah shook her head, squinting up at the progress of the elevator down the side of the mesa, and wouldn’t elaborate even when Aloy nudged and needled her about it.

The marketplace, when they finally reached it, was completely packed with people. Bodies and colours were everywhere, and there was a cacophony of voices all trying desperately to be heard over one another.

“There’s no stopping good news,” Talanah marvelled. Crowds of people from nearly every tribe filled the square - luckily for Aloy, Talanah was good at making enough room through the crowd for Aloy and her crutch to get through.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Aloy asked breathlessly, and Talanah shook her head.

“My father used to tell me about days where the market was so full you couldn't move,” she said, punctuating her words by bodily shoving someone who wasn't listening to her requests to get past, “I didn't really think he meant it like _this_.”

Someone ran past Aloy while carrying a chicken, feathers scattering behind them, and Aloy narrowly avoided getting ploughed over.

“And I thought Mother’s Watch was busy,” Aloy muttered to herself.

“It’s like the entire Sundom is here,” Talanah said by way of agreement, “and they brought along everyone they know.”

Eventually they crossed the square, and the streets started to clear. Talanah made a few attempts at conversation, but Aloy couldn’t focus on much of what her friend was saying. 

The truth was there in front of her. So many people in the city could only mean that what Avad had said - what  _ everyone _ had been saying - about the machines was true. 

The obvious benefit was that the mutated machines didn’t seem to be appearing any more, and in that sense, Aloy had achieved what she had set out to do. One less Cauldron wouldn’t matter too much in the scheme of things, but she knew she needed to find a real solution to the mutations - she couldn’t afford to break all of the Cauldrons just for the sake of safety.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this one. I thought I'd get it done over E3 (I took Monday and Tuesday off work to watch the livestreams in the middle of the night lmao) but that didn't happen, and then I spent last weekend sorting my garden out (the grass was like 2ft high I swear, and I got a wicked sunburn).  
> I usually have like between an hour and an hour and a half on this per day around my work times, but it's been really hard to focus on this chapter - I think it's probably because there's less action in it, and less events in it that I had properly planned out so I was essentially winging the whole thing.  
> After this, we return to our regularly planned-out chapters, so I should have much less trouble getting them out :) Probably won't have one by Wednesday, but we shall see.
> 
> I tried to have a lot more character interaction in here, to make up with my more action/mystery-heavy chapters. Let me know what you think!
> 
> Edit: sorry if you had duplicate emails about this chapter update, but there was a mistake I had to fix (as usual, sigh).


	9. Nine

Aloy lay awake, tossing and turning. The humid heat was oppressive, her skin was sticky with sweat and the air was almost too thick to breathe. She had long since kicked off the scratchy bedsheets, and her window shutters were thrown wide open, but there was no breeze to help cool her down. Spring in the Embrace was never as hot as it was in Meridian, especially not as hot as it was that night, and if she was up to travelling, she'd probably have been halfway there already. With her wounds still healing, she couldn’t afford to take a dip in the canals, either - she had had one infection already; if she developed another one, Abi would probably kill Aloy herself.

Finally, she gave up her fruitless effort and rolled out of the cot, sneaking out of the infirmary without using the crutch in the hopes of getting past Abi without being caught. She plodded along down the dimly lit hallways, hearing no sound except her own footsteps on the polished stone surface. The palace was different at night; the usually busy corridors were empty, and the sunlight that streamed in through the many open windows was absent. None of the windows, however, had even a suggestion of a breeze blowing through. Her leg was healing much faster than anticipated, but a month into her recovery and it still hurt to walk, and it took her much longer than she had expected to get all the way down to the archery range. It was deserted in the darkness, and while Aloy waited for her eyes to finish adjusting, she stretched the aches from her limbs.

The bow was a familiar weight in her hands, and she stepped up to the firing line, drawing an arrow with practised ease. A number of seconds passed while she lined up the shot. The arrow flew, hit the Watcher target at the end with a satisfying ‘thunk,’ and she smiled to herself. Aloy lined up her next shot, but her arm started to shake with the exertion after only a few seconds of having the arrow pulled back. The second arrow glanced off the very edge of the target, and the third missed it completely. Aloy growled wordlessly in frustration, and quickly emptied her quiver of arrows with every shot getting progressively worse.

With her arrows depleted, she stalked up the length of the range, picking arrows out of the grass. A muscle in her leg twinged painfully and Aloy yelped, dropping to her knees on the ground. She sat for a moment, head bowed and breathing harshly through her teeth while the pain passed.

“Everything okay?” A voice called in the silence, and her head darted up. Erend was approaching from the sidelines, concern all over his face. He was still clad in his armour, even in the middle of the night.

“What are you doing here?” Aloy asked warily, accepting his extended hand. He pulled her back to her feet and stepped away while she brushed herself down. “How did you find me?”

“I saw you sneaking off in the dark with your bow,” Erend said, “now, I'm no genius, but I thought there was a good chance you'd be here.”

Aloy huffed and went to retrieve her last arrow - the only one that had hit the target - doing her best to disguise her limp on the way. Erend and Talanah (and Abi, and Avad, and just about anyone else who had come to visit her) had been nagging her to take it easy while she healed. In her opinion, she had spent long enough lying around and doing nothing but ‘healing’, and she was close to snapping and biting someone’s head off the next time they suggested it to her.

The arrow, when she reached it, was stuck fast in the straw Watcher’s tail. Aloy wrapped her hand around it and yanked, hissing at the painful spasm that shot up her arm as a result. She flexed her shaking fingers and tried the other arm, managing to slowly wiggle the arrow out of the target. When she turned to walk back to the firing line, Erend was still there.

“You've never broken a bone before, have you?” he said, more a statement than a question, while she positioned herself on the line and readied her bow. Her arm shook, and she missed the straw Watcher entirely, the arrow sailing over its back. She growled wordlessly and glared down the range.

“Of course I've broken bones before,” she retorted, and then rhetorically “did you see the Brave Trails?”

Aloy let fly another arrow, and snarled in frustration when it barely even reached the end of the firing range. Her arm was still shaking, even at her side, and at first she didn't even feel Erend's fingertips on her elbow. She whipped her head around to him, teeth bared in a snarl, and he held his hand up to pacify her.

“Why don't you take a break for a minute?” he suggested gently. She opened her mouth to snap back with something biting, but he spoke over her before she could, gesturing back to the sidelines, where a glass bottle lay in the grass, “let me pay you back for the ale, at least.”

Aloy huffed again. Her blood burned with frustration and anger, and still her muscles betrayed her by shaking. She exhaled hard, and allowed herself to be lead toward the grass. Erend sat first, the leather in his Vanguard armour creaking, and she followed without any of the gracefulness she had previously possessed, the aches in her leg making every movement awkward. Erend made no comment and uncorked the bottle with a knife, sniffing it before holding it out to her. She eyed the bottle, and raised an eyebrow at him.

“It's called wine,” he explained, “It’s like beer, but they make it with grapes.”

Curiosity piqued, Aloy curled her shaking fingers around the neck of the bottle and took a quick swig, immediately pulling a face.

“This is nothing like beer,” Aloy declared, her face scrunched up, “and also nothing like grapes.”

“I didn't say it was _good_ ,” Erend chuckled. He took the bottle back and had a swallow for himself, smacking his lips together contemplatively and grimacing, “it's not so bad.”

“‘Not so bad’,” Aloy scoffed, “I see why they call it _whine_ ,”

Erend laughed aloud, his shoulders shaking, and passed the bottle back to her. They sat in companionable silence, occasionally exchanging the bottle between them. Overhead, the stars crawled across the sky, and the street torches up in Meridian glowed orange. Aloy’s anger passed as quickly as it had come, and was replaced with curiosity.

“What kept you up so late?” Aloy queried.

“You know me, always burning the midnight oil,” Erend replied. Aloy raised an eyebrow at his evasiveness, “you?”

Aloy told him about her trouble sleeping, and her desire to be free of the infirmary. Erend watched her curiously while she spoke, his eyes narrowed and head tilted, and she straightened up almost imperceptibly under his scrutiny.

“What?”

“Well, you made it all the way down here without any help,” he pointed out, gesturing to the Maizelands around them with the neck of the bottle, “I would’ve thought you’d be back to living in your old rooms by now,”

Aloy raised her eyebrows and hummed in thought. Avad had allocated one of the palace’s guest wings to her after the battle with HADES, and while she had utilised the rooms at first, after she built her home near Daytower she hadn't used them as much. It had been so long since she had stayed in Meridian that she hadn't even considered it as an option.

“That's not a half-bad idea,” she said, eyeing him, “maybe you're not just all muscle after all,” she added with a sly grin.

Erend lifted his chin. “I don't know what you mean,” he said mock-innocently, while tensing his arms so that the muscles bulged, making Aloy laugh. He chuckled and leaned back on his elbow, looking out across the plains before them. For a minute, the only sound was Aloy idly ripping the grass out of the ground.

“You don't have to stay out here with me,” Aloy murmured, “I know I'm not much fun, lately,”

“I'm sat under the stars with my good friend, who happens to be a very attractive - but also very irritating - woman, sharing the nearest thing I have to alcohol,” he shrugged noncommittally, “I've had worse nights,”

Aloy grinned, and rolled her eyes at him.

“You've definitely had too much if you're flirting with me.”

“Pfff,” he said, “I don't need to be drunk for that.”

“Well, then, pass it back; I might need to be drunk to listen to you,” she replied sweetly, and he hissed and clutched his chest dramatically.

“Straight for the throat,” he croaked. Aloy tittered, and took a deep draft of the wine. She lowered the bottle to see Erend’s gaze fixed on her, with her cheeks puffed out, and she swallowed hard.

“What?” she asked again, and he shook his head, gesturing for the bottle.

“I broke my foot once, when I was a kid,” Erend said, unbidden, resting the bottle on his lip as he gazed forward into the darkness, “my mom wouldn't let me out of the house for weeks after it healed up. I thought I'd finally have some peace when she passed, but then Ersa decided to become a responsible adult and take part in a rebellion, so,” he shrugged, taking a swig and then offering it to Aloy, “I guess I can kind of understand how she felt.”

Aloy tilted her head, accepting the bottle from him. “How did you break it?”

Erend rubbed his neck sheepishly as he answered; he had picked a fight with some of the older kids and had his ass handed to him with embarrassing ease. Aloy ducked her head to hide her grin. The thought of Erend as a scrawny little kid was not what she had expected - in fact, looking at him as an adult built of bulk and muscle, she had expected the opposite.

“I've broken this arm before,” she admitted.

“On the Brave Trails, I'm guessing,”

Aloy shook her head in response. She had fallen a lot while attempting the Brave Trails as a child, as the course was designed for people who, at the time, were much taller than her. Luckily, the worst she’d ever had from it were some bruises.

“I was about seven. I wasn't so good at using the Focus yet; I fell down into my second metal ruin in the space of a year. Landed right on my elbow,” her smile twisted, and became rueful, “Rost had to climb down and get me. He was so angry, but, looking back, I guess he was just worried…” she trailed off, pulled into the recesses of her memory. She had forgotten how lucky she had been to come away unharmed the first time, and had just gone off on her own without Rost even knowing. When she fell, and realised she was injured, she had called for him until her voice was raw. He had kept Aloy on a shorter leash for a while after that, which she of course hadn’t agreed with at the time.

“Do you ever think about what you'd do differently, if they were still here?” she asked quietly, as suddenly as it had occurred to her. Erend inhaled, loud enough for her to hear.

“All the time,” he said with certainty. Aloy hummed in agreement.

“I wish I’d been less focused on finding my mother,” she admitted, frowning deeply. “I found the answers I was looking for, and it didn’t even change anything. It only mattered to me because it mattered to the Nora, and… Rost is dead because of it.” Aloy trailed off.

Erend thumped the empty bottle onto the grass, loud enough in the silence to make her jump.

“You’re wrong,” he growled, full of conviction. His cheeks were reddening with the wine, but his eyes were clear, “he died because of a cult, and the machine they took orders from. If it hadn’t happened, and if you hadn’t gotten involved, we’d probably _all_ be dead by now,” he sat up again, and pointed his finger at her, “you took your pain and you _used it_.

“Me?” he continued, growing noticeably more agitated, “I was a shitty brother, and an even shittier soldier. I spent my first week as Captain at the bottom of a barrel,” he grumbled, and then laughed bitterly, “I’m still falling short.”

Aloy studied Erend’s profile, from his furrowed eyebrows to his downturned lips, considering what he had said. She had only known him for a heartbeat before Ersa had died, when he had been inherently confident, and callous, and free of responsibility. She still held that first conversation close - the first time someone other than Rost had been kind to her, and the first time she had been spoken to as an equal. The first time she had been something other than Motherless.

Even though the weight of her own grief was too much for her to bear, she had helped him because of that brief kindness. Years later, sat beside her in the dark when he could be at a tavern, or in his bed sleeping, she saw right through him and knew that it was because, like her, he couldn’t stand to see her alone in her pain. He had grown insurmountably as a leader, and even though he had more than enough responsibility on his shoulders, he still made time for her. He still made time to be kind.

“I don’t think you’re falling short,” she said, barely louder than a whisper, but still drawing his attention, “I think you had a lot to grow into at first, and you… _coped_ however you could. Nobody can fault you for that.”

“You dealt with it a lot better than I did,” he groused, barely audible over the breeze and the rustling grass, “and I can sure as hell fault myself for it.” The grey-iron colour of his irises were almost deep blue in the dark, and Aloy noticed for the first time how closely they were sitting. She could practically feel the warmth of his skin as if they were touching. Her heart pounded in her chest and Aloy inhaled shakily, unable to look away.

“Now you’re just arguing for the sake of it” she said, lifting her chin, inadvertently bringing her face nearer to his. She was so close to him, she was sure he could hear the rushing in her ears. Aloy froze, on the precipice of- of _something_. Erend was staring at her as if mesmerised.

“Probably,” he murmured, ducking his head toward her another inch, so close she could practically taste the words, and-

Aloy’s Focus chirped and lit up. She jerked herself away instinctively to look for the source, releasing Erend’s scarf from her firm grip - _when_ had she done that? - to see a Strider approaching from across the plain, sparks coming from its side. Her heart started pounding for an entirely new reason.

“Machine,” Erend hissed, his voice hoarse, as he reached for the discarded bow.

Aloy placed her had on his arm to still him. “Wait,” she whispered.

The Strider continued its approach, awkward on its one side. Aloy climbed to her feet, using Erend's shoulder as a support.

“What are you _doing_ ,” he hissed, trying to yank her back down and almost succeeding, “it hasn't seen us yet,”

“It has,” she disagreed, staring right into the blue light of the Strider’s lens, “it's looking right this way.”

Erend froze, his hand wrapped around her upper arm and her hand still on his shoulder. He relaxed his grip, and Aloy knew he had figured it out too.

The Strider came to a stop just shy of where Aloy stood, and pawed at the ground with its feet, everything turning silver where its light shone. Aloy stepped forward and rested her palm on what would have been its snout, if it were made of flesh and blood.

“I thought it got destroyed,” she commented, eyebrows drawn together in confusion.

“No, not destroyed,” Erend said, getting to his feet, “we didn't think you were that attached to it,”

Aloy shrugged a shoulder, “I'm not, usually, but they don't usually cross the desert to get back to me,”

“Yeah. You've gotta be devoted to do something crazy like that,”

Aloy smiled as she continued to examine the Strider’s body. It had taken a hit on its side, hence the sparks, but was otherwise no worse for wear. She mounted it awkwardly, and grinned down at Erend.

“Looks like I’ve got transport again,”

Erend was staring at the Strider, and his response when he finally made one was noncommittal, and distant.

“Yeah,” he said at length, shouldering her bow and not taking his eyes off of the machine. Aloy pressed her lips together and kicked the Strider into motion, taking the walk back to Upper Meridian easily. The movement still agitated her leg, but it wasn’t as bad as walking, and nowhere near as bad as it had been when the wound was first open.

Aloy’s intention had been to ride the Strider up to where she usually moored it on the outskirts of the mesa and then walk back to the infirmary herself, but when she slowed the machine down, Erend tugged on one of the cables in its neck to urge it on again. Aloy looked at him quizzically.

“I’ll bring it back,” Erend said gruffly. His cheeks and the tips of his ears had gone a ruddy red colour, and Aloy couldn't help the smile that grew on her face. He was _blushing!_

When they arrived at the infirmary, Aloy planted her hand on his shoulder and swung her leg over the Strider, carefully supported between man and machine while she lowered herself to the ground. The Strider moved and she stumbled, and was steadied by Erend’s hand on her waist. In an instant, her heart was back to racing, fuelled on by the closeness of his body to hers, of their breath mingling between them. He cleared his throat and stepped away a fraction. She followed his line of sight. The side of the Strider that wasn’t sparking was covered in blood, brown and flaking. Aloy felt a lump form in her throat.

“Look, about the archery thing,” Erend said, giving her arm a squeeze, “give yourself time. You'll be back on form before you know it.”

“I hope so,” she said in a quiet voice. Erend stood beside her for a moment longer, his gloved fingers warm on her bare arm, before leading the Strider away.

“Wait,” Aloy blurted. He stopped, giving her a questioning look, and before she could lose her nerve, Aloy darted forward, pressing a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth. He froze, eyebrows raised, and she sank back onto her heels.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling, “for keeping me company.”

Erend cleared his throat again and nodded erratically, “Sure,” he said, too loud, his head still bobbing, “don't worry about it, it's uh, it's…” he trailed off, and nodded once more, “sure.”

Aloy grinned up at him fondly, and bid him goodnight.

* * *

 

Inside the infirmary, Abi was bustling around with a basket full of clean bedding and a harried look on her face. She followed Aloy back to her room, muttering all the way. Aloy rolled her eyes and threw the shutters open again.

“Of course, she was out gallivanting,” Abi remarked, clicking her tongue, “you'd think she had some regard for the people who kept her alive, but _no_!”

Before Aloy could answer, some of the other nurses rushed by, carrying baskets of herbs and vessels of water, one of them firing off rapid instructions to the others, drowning out anything Aloy could have said.

“What's all that about?” Aloy asked bemusedly.

“Trust me, you don't want details,” Abi replied, “there's bodily fluids everywhere- and not the good kind,”

“That sounds… pleasant,” Aloy said, wrinkling her nose.

“It's not,” Abi retorted, as Aloy flopped backwards onto the cot, “take my advice, for once, and stay out of it.”

Aloy snorted through her nose and said there was no danger of her getting involved with _that_ problem. Abi puttered around for a moment longer, checking Aloy’s wound (probably more out of habit than necessity at that point, Aloy thought) and tidying up some of the flotsam that had accumulated during Aloy’s stay.

When she was finally alone, Aloy pressed her grinning face into her pillow, her belly full of butterflies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAAA I wanted them to kiss so much but the time wasn't right. I'm so sorry. I promise there's more fluff coming. This 2000+ word block of fluff wasn't enough.
> 
> If you aren't here for the fluff, then I got you too bro; we are back to our scheduled plot as of the next chapter.
> 
>  
> 
> PLEASE tell me what you think, guys; I live off of comments.
> 
> Edit: I've edited the tags per [AO3's changes to Gen Relationship Tags](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/7413), to include Aloy & Talanah as a platonic relationship. I did intend on showing Aloy's platonic relationships as being as important as her romantic one with Erend, which is why I'm adding this new tag in. When she interacts with more people in coming chapters, I should be adding more such tags to the Relationships field.  
> I've also added an estimated chapter length, which is exciting, but knowing me it also will probably change!


	10. Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you ever written a multi-chaptered fanfic, posting as you went, and realised that some of the details you thought you’d written down… well… you hadn’t?
> 
> [facepalm]
> 
> As of 07/07, I’ve gone back and fixed a few things chapter 7 onwards, and instead of forcing people to re-read the whole fanfic, I’ve logged the changes in [this post on my tumblr.](http://spooopygames.tumblr.com/post/162723597526/ap-changelog) Reading that post should get you up to speed.
> 
> I realise that this is kind of a sucky thing for me to do, and believe me, it's not due to lack of planning. It’s a limitation of the post-as-you-write format. I write this way because, otherwise, this fic probably wouldn’t get finished at all - unfortunately, that is why this retrospective edit was necessary.
> 
> Ultimately, I am not a professional, I’m making and sharing this thing for free, and I couldn’t continue as I am without first addressing these errors.

Three days later, after Abi had begrudgingly discharged her from the infirmary under strict instruction to come back for regular check-ups, Aloy strode through the palace with a spring in her step and no crutch at her side. She had walked around the palace, down to the Marketplace and even further down to the Maizelands every day since the first time she snuck away, and slowly but surely, her limp was disappearing. Moving back into her old rooms at the palace, where she could have entire exterior doorways open all night long, or even sleep on the adjoined terrace if she so wished, meant that she was getting more sleep than she probably ever had in her life, and she was feeling stronger than she had in weeks.

Aloy had been relieved to be reunited with her weapons again - even in such a well-fortified city, she felt very vulnerable without the means to defend herself. Finding all of her things neatly stacked in her old Palace rooms was a welcome surprise, and getting to swing her spear around was helping rebuild the lost muscle mass in her arms.

It was with her spear that she trotted through the palace hallways, a very clear destination in mind. It was a relatively cool day for Meridian, and it was after lunch - when better to bother your Vanguard friend into helping you train? The now-familiar sensation of butterflies in her stomach made itself known, and she bit her lip in an effort to dampen the excited grin that spread across her face.

“Enter.” Erend’s Captain-Voice ordered through the solid wood door after she knocked. The room had again changed since her last visit, but not as drastically; rather, everything was just put away neatly, and she didn't have to meander around piled up books and scrolls. Erend was sat at his desk, head supported by his fist at his temple, reading some papers with a deep frown on his face. He glanced up at her for all of a millisecond, his expression not changing in the slightest, and Aloy paused halfway through the room, suddenly unsure of herself. 

“Everything ok?” he asked gruffly. 

“Uh, yeah,” replied Aloy cautiously, “actually, I wanted to see if you would train with me.”

Erend didn't answer for a moment, and Aloy waited with surprising patience, which ran out as soon as he looked up at her and said “hmm?” like he hadn't even been listening. Aloy repeated herself flatly, and he scrubbed his face with his hand. 

“I would, Aloy, but I'm up to my neck,” he said, gesturing to the stack of paper and the a small map of the Sundom next to him, “sorry; some other time?”

“Sure,” she replied, a little bit crestfallen. She had been looking forward to getting a good, sweaty workout. However, Erend had already looked back down to his work, and her interruption was clearly over. Curious, she tried surreptitiously leaning closer over his desk, activating her Focus, intending to scan the document he was reading. He was quicker, however, and turned it over with a snap.

“Talanah probably wouldn't pass up the chance for a good fight,” Erend suggested, placidly raising an eyebrow at her. She folded her arms.

“Getting rid of me again?”

“No,” he rubbed his eyes with his fingertips, like she was giving him a headache, and her arms tightened across her chest, “it's not like that; you know I'd prefer ditching all of this for training any day. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I could.”

Aloy studied him, chewing the inside of her cheek. It was unlike him to really hide something from her, and the curiosity was eating her up. He seemed sincere, though, and she was sure that he would tell her about whatever it was he was hiding soon enough. Aloy relaxed her arms, dropping them to her sides, and offered him a smile. 

“See you later, then?”

“Sure thing.”

 

* * *

 

Talanah was much more inclined to go out with Aloy than Erend had been, though she still clammed up with a sour look on her face any time Aloy came anywhere near mentioning the Captain of the Vanguard. 

“You could just tell me what happened, you know. I could knock some sense into him,” Aloy suggested while the elevator shuddered down the side of the mesa. 

“ _ I _ could beat him up if I wanted,” Talanah replied, leaning back against the railing, “but I don't want him to apologise just because he's been made to.”

“You know, I could still ask him to apologise. I don't need the details,” Aloy pointed out. The elevator jolted to a stop at the bottom of the cliff side, and Talanah yanked the grating open while she replied. 

“Yeah, but you won't,” she grunted, the grating sticking a little, “because you wouldn't go against me like that.”

“...True.” Aloy conceded with a shrug. 

Talanah slung her arm over Aloy’s shoulders, and steered her toward the training grounds. “Enough about him, anyway. It's been forever since I had a good challenge; I don't want him to spoil a nice day.”

Aloy smirked and said that Talanah would probably be waiting a while before Aloy was anywhere near “good challenge” level. Talanah eyed the thinness of Aloy’s arms and hummed thoughtfully. 

“Don't you worry, Thrush of mine; we'll toughen you up again.” Talanah declared, releasing Aloy with a pat on the back.

They approached the training grounds at a regular pace. Aloy was pleased at how effortless walking felt to her now, and how well she kept up with Talanah, and was grinning from ear to ear. Rehabilitation was challenging, and it was good to finally feel some results. 

“Where is everyone?” Talanah wondered aloud, sweeping her staff from side to side to warm up. They had expected to be waiting for one of the rings to clear before they got their turn, but most of the training ground was empty, and they were able to start straight away.

“Maybe they’re all at the infirmary,” Aloy joked. Abi had been too busy to see her when she went by that morning, and Aloy hadn’t been sure of what to do with herself after she was turned away at the door.

Talanah grinned, and readied her spear. 

They started easy, more as a warm-up than anything, and Aloy performed better than she had expected, given her bad experience with the bow only a few days previously. They sparred until Aloy's arms shook too much to carry on, and she leaned on her spear, panting hard and beaming. She had a couple of fresh bruises on her hands and legs, where she had either been clumsy or too slow, and the pain of exertion had never felt better. 

“The Sun has seen your accomplishments,” Talanah said, with a dramatic flourish, before pulling a face, “and it rewards us by being disgustingly hot.”

Aloy laughed, shielding the sunlight with her hand. Talanah's skin glistened with sweat, and she had very much the same self-satisfied expression on her face that Aloy must have had. By mutual agreement, they meandered towards the river to cool off.

“You should try training with little bags of sand,” Talanah suggested, kicking a pebble that was in the path, “you know; lift it one hundred times on one side and one hundred times on the other. It's boring, but you'll build your muscle back up fast.”

Aloy hummed in thought. “I hadn't thought of that. I've never really built muscle purposefully.”

Talanah laughed and shook her head, “Being strong to survive, and not for the sake of being strong. What a novel idea,” she said sardonically. Aloy rolled her eyes, the corners of her mouth turning up, and told her that they'd clearly been hanging out too much.

Like the training grounds, the river was relatively quiet when they reached it - luckily, there wasn’t even a Snapmaw in sight - and Talanah immediately started to drop her armour on the ground piece by piece. Aloy propped her spear up carefully against a rock, and had started to peel her sweaty clothes off when she caught sight of the river properly. 

“What the-?” she muttered under her breath. She pulled her top back down over her navel and gestured at Talanah, who was undoing the clasps on her legs, “Talanah, look.”

There were small mounds of white froth floating down the river, clinging to the sides of the bank. Aloy got closer for a better look, narrowing her eyes. The normally clear water was cloudy and dark, and where someone could usually clearly see right down to the riverbed even at the deepest part, she could barely see past the first metre of water.

“That's not right,” Talanah surmised. She looked lopsided with half her armour on and half of it littering the riverbank around her feet, but it didn't seem to bother her, “what could be causing it?”

“I don't know, the machines are supposed to-” Aloy froze, a lead weight settling deep in her stomach, her mouth running dry. 

“The machines are supposed to, what, keep the river clean?” Talanah asked in disbelief. Numb, Aloy nodded. 

“Some of them are, anyway,” she said slowly, “this is bad.”

Talanah's eyes widened, and Aloy swallowed hard, her hands shaking. 

“Maybe everyone  _ is _ at the infirmary after all.”

 

* * *

 

Aloy's mind was racing. 

She had worked it out from every angle while she had been recovering;  _ yes, _ Cauldron Rho was gone, but there should have been plenty of machines coming from the remaining Cauldrons to support everyone - more than enough to keep the water clean. The river being in the condition that it was in was bad, and suggested to her that it wasn’t just Rho that had gone dark. The only way she could know for certain was by going to see for herself.

People jumped out of her path as she sprinted through the streets, her injured leg holding strong, and Talanah on her heels. Suddenly, Aloy came to a stop, and cursed.

“My Strider’s gone,” Aloy said, looking around herself to see if it had just… wandered away, somehow. If it were any other time, she would just go out and find something else to transport her to her destination, but, of course, none of the usual machine sites were populated with anything. The machines must have all either moved on, or, as she suspected, been killed off and not replenished.

“You can’t go all the way to the Cauldrons on your own, it’d be suicide,” Talanah insisted, “tell me what you need.”

Aloy nodded in agreement. “I need my Strider,” she replied, “it’s supposed to be here, I haven’t used it since-” she paused. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen her Strider since the other night, when Erend had been the one to take it away. Her eyes widened, and she nodded fervently, “can you be ready in an hour?”

Talanah said she could, and Aloy sped off toward the palace without so much as a backward glance. She must have had quite the expression on her face; people continued to jump out of her way, and she made it to the palace in record time. Aloy jogged through the halls, her footsteps thudding loudly on the polished stone. She burst through Erend’s door without so much as knocking.

“My Strider” she blurted, chest heaving from the exertion, “I need my Strider.”

“Woah, slow down,” Erend said, still sat at his desk and holding his palms up to her, “what’s the hurry?”

“The water’s dirty.” Aloy said, and when he raised an eyebrow at her, “the soldiers are all getting sick because the river is- it’s cloudy, and frothing. The machines should be keeping it all clean, but they aren’t.”

“The soldiers are probably just hungover, celebrating the end of the Derangement,” Erend said with a shrug, tucking some of his papers away into a drawer in his desk, not meeting her eye, “you know what soldiers are like.”

Aloy shook her head, and paced her hands flat on the desk, stood opposite to him. “They’re sick, I checked with Abi.  _ I need my Strider _ .” She repeated, beginning to lose patience with him. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his neck absently.

“I cleaned it up for you; it’s in the west courtyard,” he admitted finally, and jumped up from his seat when Aloy made a beeline for the door. “Wait!” he called. 

Aloy paused partway across the room and looked back impatiently, hands balled into fists. She didn’t have the time to waste, not when half of Meridian’s military were out of action.

“Are you sure it’s the water?” Erend asked, “I mean, we’ve lost whole herds of machines for weeks before without anyone getting sick. I love my soldiers, but they aren’t all so good with the personal hygiene; maybe that's the reason?” he added somewhat sheepishly. Aloy shook her head in disagreement.

“If we lost just a few machines, then no, I wouldn’t think it was the water,” she conceded, “but this is too fast, Erend, and there are too many sick people at once. It  _ has _ to be the water, and if it is, that means it’s more than just a few machines that are gone.

“There’s another Cauldron, to the south,” she explained, “it’s not that far. I’m going to check it out.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Aloy bristled. “Got any better ideas?”

“Well,  _ no, _ but-”

“Then I have to go.” Aloy said, her tone final. She strode from the office, and was one foot out of the door when Erend spoke again.

“They’re all down.”

Aloy stopped, her brain working to catch up with what he had said. She turned back slowly, ignoring the curious looks she was getting from the people in the main office.

“What?” she asked incredulously. Erend was looking her straight in the eye, his expression completely serious, and she felt her belly turn to ice.

“All of the Cauldrons,” he clarified, “they’re all dark. No machines are coming out of them.”

Aloy frowned, and blinked hard.  _ “What? _ ” she asked again, “how could you know that?”

“I had them all scouted,” he said gruffly, “they’ve been dark for weeks.”

Aloy struggled to comprehend all that he was saying. If all the Cauldrons were dark, that would mean that  _ all _ the machines were gone, or as good as. Water everywhere would be filthy, people everywhere would be getting sick and dying - and it was her fault.

Aloy’s stomach dropped, and acid bile rose in her throat.

Erend had known.

The whole time, Erend had fucking  _ known. _

Aloy turned on her heel and was out of his office again before she could hardly blink, the palace hallways passing in a blur.

“Aloy!” Erend called, his footsteps thundering on the stone floor, “where are you going?” he asked when he drew level. Aloy ploughed on, head lowered and jaw set.

“I’m going to All-Mother,” she stated, “it’s the only place you can’t have scouted.”

“If you wait, I’ll come along.”

“No, that’s okay,” she said acidly, bursting through the doors into the courtyard where he had left her Strider, “you’ve got a lot of work to do here. Should be a lot easier for you to handle without having to worry about lying to me about it all, too.”

Erend swore then, and Aloy clenched her fists so hard that her fingernails bit into her palms. He wasn’t even  _ trying _ to deny it. She threw the travel pack she had picked up on the way over the Strider’s rear, and Erend muttered something under his breath that she didn’t catch.

"I'll send some of my men with you, then." He instead proposed, a curt, insistent edge to his voice.

"I work better alone," Aloy said dismissively, hastily strapping her gear to the obedient Strider.

" _ Fire and spit _ , Aloy. The last time you said that, you were lucky we found you before the Glinthawks did." Erend replied bluntly, his tone growing more and more agitated.

Impatiently, Aloy snapped, "Can we not do this right now?"

"When would you prefer we do this?” he demanded, “because I'm pretty sure I've already had enough conversations by your deathbed!"

The people that were milling around in the courtyard mysteriously made themselves scarce at Erend's outburst. Aloy grit her teeth and turned to him, eyes blazing.

"People are in danger," she hissed, "and unless any of your men can get to the Embrace in less than a week, they  _ will _ slow me down."

"So I'm supposed to just sit here and pretend like I don't care?" he asked incredulously, jabbing his chest with his finger.

“Why not? You’ve been doing pretty good at it so far.” Aloy said flatly. Erend cursed loudly and spun on his heels, pacing back and forth in short bursts like a caged animal. Aloy turned back to the Strider and fixed the last pack to its side with shaking fingers, her heart hammering with adrenaline. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, her hands balling into fists against the Strider's metal hide. 

Erend's heavy footsteps stopped abruptly.

"I can't do it," he bit out, resolute despite the quiver in his voice, "I can't pretend like I don't care about you."

Erend came closer, close enough that she could hear him breathing angrily through his nose. She turned to him automatically, blinking her vision clear in the afternoon sun.

"To be completely honest," he said lowly through his teeth, a maelstrom of emotion painted across his features, "it burns me up that you  _ can _ ."

Aloy’s mouth worked soundlessly, and she struggled to get her words out. 

"You say you care for me,” Aloy choked through the lump in her throat, “but you’ve been  _ lying _ to me-”

“I've been trying to keep you safe!” Erend interrupted. 

“By not even letting me have a  _ choice _ !” she interrupted right back, snapping, “Is that how it is? ‘Can’t tell Aloy what’s going on; she might do something dumb like try and fix it! Can’t bring Aloy’s Strider back with us; she’ll just get away quicker!’”

Erend growled, “It wasn’t like that.”

“Then  _ why _ ?”

“Because I wanted to avoid…  _ this _ !” he exclaimed, gesturing at the Strider and at her, all geared up and ready to go. Aloy shook her head sorrowfully, and he threw his hands up in exasperation, “I wanted to avoid you getting yourself killed, and  _ I’m _ the bad guy. I don’t get it.”

“Gee, I wonder why someone not telling me the truth for so long would be a bad thing,” she spat venomously, “can’t have anything to do with being shunned for the first nineteen years of my life, or, you know, the person who raised me  _ dying _ instead of just telling me I was born in a mountain!” 

Aloy’s chest was heaving when she finished, and when the anger in Erend’s face faltered, she knew she had hit her mark. She swallowed hard and heaved herself up onto the Strider, her grip on its neck cables white-knuckled and shaking.

“Move,” she said to him dangerously, “or I’m going through you.”

Erend maintained eye contact for a moment longer, before pressing his lips together and stepping aside. Aloy kicked the Strider harder than necessary to get it going, and sped out of the city without a backwards glance.

She was barely halfway across the bridge before her tears started to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this was truly set in like the Middle Ages, they wouldn't know anything about germ theory or contaminated water getting people sick. However, the first children out of the Cauldrons were educated to a kindergarten level, and there are plenty of kids nowadays that are that young and that know about germs, at least in a rudimentary sense.
> 
> If you're confused because, previously, it seemed like Aloy already knew all the Cauldrons were down; please go back up and read my note at the beginning of the chapter. All will make sense.


	11. Eleven

Through the night Aloy rode, the Metal hooves of the Strider pummeling the ground beneath her, her head bowed low against the wind. She made good time, not having herds of machines to strategically avoid, and Lone Light and Daytower both passed by in a blur. Aloy found herself with ample time to think; the quiet and solitude of travelling alone was as exhausting as it was reinvigorating.

Telling Erend that she was going to All-Mother had been a knee-jerk reaction. At the time, all Aloy could really think about was getting far away from Meridian - she had been cooped up there far too long, regardless. After giving it some serious thought, however, she realised she had actually made a valid point; the Sacred Lands  _ were _ the only place Erend and his men couldn’t have scouted. With all of the Cauldrons being broken, and GAIA herself long gone, the Cradle facility ELEUTHIA-9 - inside the womb of All-Mother - was probably the last remaining part of Project: Zero Dawn, and was the last hope Aloy really had of finding a solution to the mess she had made _.  _ She didn’t even know if the Cradle was still  _ working, _ but it was the only course of action she could feasibly take.

Aloy squinted up at where she knew Hunter’s Gathering was perched on the side of the mountain, blinking her dry, tired eyes. She had cried so much since racing out of Meridian that she felt hollow and empty, and had pushed herself so hard that she was in danger of falling straight off of her Strider if she didn't stop for a break. 

There were only a handful of people milling around the outpost when she got there, all of them looking worn and haggard. Aloy dismounted her Strider and slowly lowered herself to sit by one of the smaller campfires, all of her muscles aching and sore from so long in the saddle. The Strider sat in its awkward four-legged way behind her, its hard edges digging into her back when she leaned into it. She made quick work of skinning a rabbit she had come by on the trail, skewering it with bits of ridge-wood too short to be useful for arrows and roasting it over the fire.

On the outside she was calm and calculated. Internally, she was still reeling, full to the brim with guilt and grief. She scowled into the flames, blinking away the tears that threatened to start welling up all over again, feeling angry and foolish all at once. The thought that Erend had known what was happening with the machines all along, and had done nothing about it, was stunning.

Well, he hadn’t exactly done  _ nothing _ about it. He had managed to get all of the Cauldrons scouted, at least, which relieved her of a lot of the legwork. All he had really neglected to do was tell her about it, which raised a couple of questions in Aloy’s mind, namely:  _ Why _ were the actions of one man bothering her so much, and  _ Why  _ did he not tell her about the extent of the machine problem until she had called him up on it? Did he truthfully not think she was healed enough, or, after seeing her injured, did he just no longer believe her to be capable enough?

Aloy grimaced at the unpleasant feeling that last thought gave her.

“Enough about him,” she muttered to herself, echoing what Talanah had said to her the day before, forcing herself to focus on something else- anything that wasn’t Erend, or the machines that she had all but made extinct.

The guards in the lone tower switched shifts, the sun sank past the mountains, and the village’s inhabitants started to retreat back to their tents. The rabbit went down easily, warming her belly, and she chased it with water that was twice-boiled to make sure it was clean enough to drink. She whittled arrow shafts mindlessly, and scowled at anyone who looked like they might approach her and try and strike up a conversation. Eventually, she stopped drawing attention, and Aloy settled back against her Strider, intending on resting her weary eyes for a few minutes before getting back on the road.

“You, girl,” someone said loudly, snapping Aloy out of her doze. She opened her eyes and was immediately blinded by sunlight. The previously quiet and calm village was enveloped in a cacophony of sound, and the large central campfire was crowded with people. 

Evidently, Aloy had slept much longer than she had intended to. 

The man who had disturbed her was tall and imposing, looming over her like a monolith, and his thick armour had seen better days. He scowled at her, saying curtly, “are you listening, girl? How much for your machine?”

Aloy wet her dry lips with her equally dry tongue. 

“It's not for sale,” she replied in a hard tone. The man snorted inelegantly.

“Be on your way, then. It’s hard selling rare machine parts when you’re sat there with a living one.”

Glaring at his retreating figure, Aloy packed up her meager supplies and climbed stiffly to her feet. She had never known Hunter’s Gathering to be a particularly affluent little outpost, but even so, it seemed that the people were not crowding the central fire as she had first assumed, but were instead gathering around a couple of trader’s stands that she hadn’t noticed when she came through the night before. 

Curiosity piqued, she approached the makeshift marketplace, browsing some of the wares over the shoulders of the people in front of her. There was nothing there that was particularly special, but her eyes widened at the prices - 500 shards each for scruffy-looking canisters of Blaze, 200 for a thin spool of wire, and 300 for a couple of half-rusted machine components, which her Focus identified as Watcher Hearts. These were the ‘rare machine parts’ that she’d been hassled over?

“Thought I told you to be on your way, girl,” the same trader from before growled menacingly, “if you ain’t buying; move along.” 

Aloy raised an eyebrow, unimpressed, and unintimidated. Still, she raised her hands placidly, and started to retreat back to her Strider.

“That’s okay,” she said pleasantly, “I don’t want to spend hundreds of shards on things I can pick up in two minutes of hunting, anyway.”

“Whatever you say,” the trader replied, snorting derisively as she mounted the Strider, his voice booming over to her, “the machines are  _ gone _ , girl. You won’t find any of these parts by hunting.”

 

* * *

 

Aloy knew the exact moment she had crossed into Nora lands, because it also happened to be the exact moment that the skies opened and poured rain down upon her. She cursed lowly and steered the Strider into the dense forest she had been skirting around, hoping the late spring growth of leaves on the trees would help keep her dry. The trees there were old, their twisted roots wrapped around rusted relics of the Metal world, their thick trunks scarred with time. Aloy’s Strider wove through the miles and miles of trees in its path without much input from her, the complete lack of patrolling machines allowing her to switch off and leave the riding to instinct. With the progress she was making, she was going to get to the North Gate by the late afternoon, and probably as far as Mother’s Watch by nightfall. Teersa would probably make her eat and rest before ‘convening with All-Mother’, which probably put her entire journey from Meridian to ELEUTHIA-9 up to about four and a half days, instead of the six she was used to. It was almost -  _ almost _ \- a shame that she was going to have to reverse whatever she had done to the Cauldrons; the shortened travel time was a definite bonus.

An arrow whizzed past her Strider, which shook its head and jerked, rearing up onto its hind legs. This time, Aloy held tight to its neck cables and was quickly able to wrestle it back under control, and had her bow drawn in record speed, firing a return arrow at the place she estimated the attack to have come from. Her Focus showed her a man, alone, hiding in the trees.

“Come out and fight with dignity!” she yelled, bravado covering up the slight tremble in her weak arms.

“Don’t shoot! I’m coming out!” a man yelled in reply. He started to emerge from the brush, and the first reaction she had upon seeing his Vanguard armour - thinking it was Erend - was to try and shoot him anyway. She fired a warning shot at the space above his head, and he ducked and swore.

“Fire and spit, Aloy!” he barked, “if saving your life ticked you off so much, I’ll remember to not do it again!”

Aloy narrowed her eyes, and relaxed her shaking arms. He looked different to the last time she had seen him - his hair was cut to the scalp, and he was skinnier - but, undoubtedly it was-

“ _ Vern _ ?” Aloy asked incredulously, “what are you doing here?”

“Trying to see my son!” he responded, “what are you doing shooting at me?!”

“You shot at me first!”

Vern opened his mouth, closed it, and scrubbed at the back of his neck with a gloved hand, grunting in what she assumed to be concession. 

“Well, then,” she said after a moment’s pause, turning the Strider to pass around him, “I'll see you in the Embrace,”

“Wait!” Vern exclaimed, thrusting a hand out to stop her and grabbing one of the Strider’s neck cables, “you're going to the Embrace?”

Aloy nodded, and Vern grinned hopefully up at her.

“I take it you’re still trying to see Mera.” Aloy surmised. Vern nodded in confirmation.

“The Braves on the Gate wouldn’t let me pass, and I didn’t much fancy getting fists and weapons involved,” Vern explained with a shake of his head, “was on my way back to Meridian, til I saw you running that Strider of yours like the Forge’s Hammer was on your tail. If you're going back to the Embrace, I want to come with you. Maybe they’ll let me in with your blessing.”

Aloy frowned and leaned back in the saddle while she considered his request. She didn't want to be responsible for someone on the trail, especially when she could barely defend herself. Maybe that was a good reason to take him along; she knew from experience that he was good with a weapon, and he had saved her life once already. The Nora wouldn’t exactly welcome Vern into the Embrace with open arms, but she was sure she could get him past the gate without a fight, at least. She owed it to him to try, if nothing else.

“You'll have to ride the Strider with me,” she warned. He replied with a noncommittal shrug, saying it'd be worth it; he’d already been too long without seeing his child. Aloy ducked her head, silent for a moment. Truthfully, she didn't know what to expect once they got to the Embrace; she hoped Teersa had kept her side of the agreement and had someone hunting for Mera, and even if she had, there was no way of knowing until they got there how many people had gotten sick from the filthy water. Aloy fervently hoped it wasn't as bad in the Embrace, hoped that the machines there had lasted longer.

“Let’s get going,” she said quietly, “we should make it to Daytower by nightfall.”

Without protest, Vern clambered up behind her on the Strider, carefully holding her waist to keep himself steady. Progress with another, much heavier, person aboard was slower-going, and felt much longer than it was due to the never-ending rows of trees. Vern talked a lot, even for an Oseram, and Aloy found herself tuning most of it out.

“Wait, go back to what you said before,” she blurted.

“What, my uncle brewing his own ale?”

“No,” she said, “the part about Erend.”

“Oh, yeah,” Vern replied, leaning back on the Strider, “He and Talanah had a huge blowout a couple days after we got you back from Daytower. Didn't help that he'd finished a whole barrel by himself.” Vern added, shaking his head. Aloy didn't say anything at first, her grip on the Strider’s neck cables turning her knuckles white.

“Do you know what they argued about?” Aloy eventually asked. If Talanah wanted her to know, she would have said something already, but the curiosity was too much. Vern hummed in thought, and shrugged a massive shoulder.

“Couldn't say.”

Aloy frowned to herself, blinking away the stray droplets of rain that dripped down her forehead and into her eyes. Still, she had no insight into what had caused the rift between her friends. If they were still at loggerheads when Aloy returned to Meridian, she would have to knock their skulls together.

The rest of the journey was made in companionable silence, much to Aloy’s relief. At one point, not long before they breached the far side of the forest, they passed through the break in the trees where, only a few months before, Aloy had met a strange Banuk shaman. The machine corpse was still there, the moss that covered it sprinkled with small flowers. Aloy suppressed a shudder and urged the Strider on.

When the rain eventually cleared, they were able to easily see the Northern Embrace Gate against the rugged mountainous backdrop. Getting to the Gate was no issue. Convincing the Braves that guarded it to let Aloy through with a strange Oseram man accompanying her was the real challenge.

“Sorry, Aloy,” the Brave apologised, without seeming sorry at all, “no outsiders; War Chief’s orders.”

Aloy chewed the inside of her lip, frowning in thought.

“Which War Chief?” She asked, calling back up to the Brave peering over the top of the Gate. They paused for a moment, having a hushed conversation with the person beside them, before replying.

“Resh.”

“Damn,” Aloy muttered under her breath, “next plan, then.

“I have a prisoner,” she called up, surreptitiously kicking Vern in the ankle when he started to argue, “High Matriarch Teersa believes him to be a thief. She asked me to retrieve him from Meridian.”

The Braves had another muttered conversation, during which she hissed at Vern to keep his mouth shut.

“Why doesn't he run?”

“Uh… he’s bound to the Strider,” Aloy lied, glad that the low evening light hid most of her face. Lying on the fly wasn't exactly her strong suit.

“We will let you pass,” the Brave said finally, “but he is yours to escort, and your responsibility,”

“That's fine,” Aloy replied before they could really finish talking, “are you gonna open the Gate, or…?”

“Patience, girl.” the Brave snapped. Aloy’s mouth shut with a clack of her teeth, and her eyebrows remained hiked up her forehead, thoroughly unimpressed. 

“The cheek of these kids,” Vern tutted from behind her. 

“Keep quiet,” she warned, “unless you  _ want _ to get shot, I mean.”

Vern didn't say anything back, so Aloy assumed he was doing as he was told. Laboriously, the Gate opened for them, and Aloy guided the Strider through.

“Well, they were being shittier than usual,” she muttered to herself after the Strider was back up to speed. Vern leaned forward to be heard over the wind whipping past them.

“Are they always like that?”

“They're not usually that bad,” she admitted, “I mean, they're Resh’s Braves, so they were never going to be  _ great _ , but…” she trailed off, shaking her head. The fear the Nora still held for other tribes continued to surprise Aloy, though she wasn't entirely sure why it did; the Nora were probably worse than the Shadow Carja when it came to clinging to tradition. 

Aloy’s intention had been to go straight to Mother’s Watch after passing through the North Gate. However, with the sun dipping past the horizon - and her extra cargo - she instead headed due west. Hopefully Mera wouldn’t mind two visitors arriving in the dead of night. Vern seemed to be growing uncomfortable on the back of the Strider, unused to it as he was, and he was holding himself completely rigid behind Aloy. As much sympathy as she felt for him, with her own legs being sore and painful to move, she didn't really fancy the prospect of camping in the Embrace, and potentially having to convince any more Braves they came across that Vern was there on Teersa’s request. Aloy pushed the Strider on.

“Steel to my soul, I'm nervous,” Vern muttered behind her. Aloy turned her head to glance at him over her shoulder. 

“You're not having second thoughts,” she said flatly, and he narrowed his eyes at her in return. 

“No. I'm just…” he sighed loudly, “it's going to be tough to adjust.”

“It won't be half as hard as it has been for Mera,” Aloy said, turning in the saddle to square up to the burly Oseram behind her, “at least you won't be alone.”

“What do you mean? I thought you Nora shared every burden.”

“They do,” Aloy said lightly, “but Mera’s an outcast. I had to bargain with the High Matriarchs just to get them to hunt for her while the baby’s young.”

“An outcast?” Vern exclaimed, his nostrils flaring, “She just had a baby, and they've cast her out. That's- it's barbaric,” he deflated suddenly, and shifted uncomfortably, “Er- no offense.”

“Its fine; I agree with you,” Aloy said dismissively, facing forward again, “they did pretty much the same thing to me when I was a baby,” she added, somber.

“It's no way to raise a child,” Vern muttered bitterly. 

Aloy said nothing in return. In her ears the Nora mother’s words echoed, the other children learning that they were to shun her. She felt Bast’s stone scrape her forehead, leaving a scar that would never fully heal. The Nora were wrong to do what they did, especially to children. Aloy knew she was one of the lucky ones; she didn’t like to wonder what would have happened to her if it wasn’t for Rost.

“Maybe you can convince her to leave with us,” Aloy suggested, the Strider slowing as it attempted the steep incline up to Rost’s home. Usually the Strider made it up the hill with no problem, but it was clearly struggling under the extra weight.

“We could live in Meridian...” Vern said, trailing off at the end almost dreamily.

“The child of an Oseram and a Nora, being raised in the Carja capital. There's a joke in there, somewhere.” Aloy commented with a wry smile.

They crested the rise to find the outdoor fire still burning, the figure of Mera sat on a log before it. Her hair was a few inches longer than the last time Aloy had seen her, and the familial paint that had been across her cheeks was washed clean. Mera rose, bow in her hand, squinting at the Strider, and then relaxed visibly as Aloy dismounted. 

“Oh, Aloy, it’s you. I thought you might-...” she started. Her eyes drifted to the extra person on the Strider’s back, and she trailed off, her expression stunned. Aloy didn’t waste any time on introductions; it was clear that Mera hadn’t forgotten what the father of her child looked like, “you… brought Vern with you.”

“I came as soon as Aloy told me…” Vern said, approaching Mera where she stood by the fire. Aloy worked at the packs strapped to the Strider with her stiff fingers, hoping she could get away before she overheard too much. She lugged everything up the stone steps and shouldered the door open, the same as she had just a few months before.

The baby was in a makeshift basket in the middle of the room, surrounded by blankets, kicking his feet and gurgling. Aloy smiled at him before she could help herself, and threw her pack up into the loft space that had once been Rost’s bunk. She busied herself by stoking the indoor fire, and gathering some bits to make a light evening meal. Mera had made even more additions to the little house in Aloy’s absence, and for the first time in years, it actually looked...  _ Lived in. _ It was an odd feeling, but Aloy realised that she didn’t feel possessive over the house any more. If Mera could use it, and make a home of it, then surely that’s what Rost would have wanted.

Aloy yanked open the pantry door, her stomach rumbling, and she sighed deeply.

The shelves were empty.

“Mera,” she called, stepping back out onto the porch, before cringing, and repeating herself. Mera and Vern separated, looking annoyed and flustered respectively, “I thought the Braves were supposed to be bringing food to you.”

“They were, but they’ve not showed up for a few days,” Mera said with a dismissive shrug, “I thought you were them, actually.”

The two went back to being joined at the face, and Aloy shut the door on them with a grimace. The baby continued to gurgle behind her in the quiet room, and anger burned in her chest.

She had a lot to talk to Teersa about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely feeling this chapter, but it was necessary.  
> Thank you so much to everyone who has read, left Kudos and commented so far!


	12. Twelve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has left kudos, bookmarked, subscribed and left comments! You all literally keep me going.  
> I apologise in advance for all of the IT stuff in this chapter.   
> I apologise for other stuff in this chapter too.

Aloy skirted the edge of the river, carrying a freshly killed turkey by its feet. The wild grasses were growing tall, no doubt nourished by the springtime mixture of rain and sun, and the air was pleasantly warm. Without hostile machines to worry about, it was nothing short of idyllic.

The previous night, she had slept like the dead. The journey back to the Embrace had been trying, and she had been much more exhausted than she had thought she was. Rising in the early morning after her first full-night’s sleep in days felt like pure luxury; and she was feeling generous enough - and hungry enough - that she decided to do some hunting while she had the chance. 

Aloy was growing stronger every day, and she had triumphantly downed the turkey in one perfectly-aimed hit. It was a hefty bird, and would take time to pluck, but it would be worth it when she filled her belly and still had some meat left over. 

Soon enough, she reached a bonfire site and set about plucking and carving the meat, listening to the breeze rustling through the grass as she worked. It felt like an age since she had been in such calm solitude - Meridian was always bustling with people, and her companionless charge across the Sundom and into the Embrace was anything but relaxing. Her task still weighed on her mind, and it wouldn't be long before she was once again in the thick of it, but it was still refreshing to be able to take some time for herself, away from prying eyes.

The turkey meat popped and sizzled on the fire, the smell making Aloy's mouth water. She watched a bird circle her in the sky before it swooped down and landed beside the riverbed. It hopped toward her, head flicking between her and the food, clearly hoping to snag a bit for itself. 

“Shoo,” Aloy hissed, and when it ignored her warning, she lightly threw a pebble at it. It flew away, the pebble missing it completely and skimming across the water. Aloy reached for another rock, in case the bird returned, Erend's voice in her ears as if he was in the Embrace beside her.

  
  


“So you find a nice smooth one, like this,” Erend said, holding up a rounded pebble for Aloy to see, “you kind of hold it like this, between your thumb and finger, and you just-” he flung his arm out in a sweeping arc, releasing the pebble with a flick of his wrist. It travelled so fast Aloy could barely keep sight of it, but she did see the circular rippling splashes that it made as it bounced off the surface of the lake once, twice three times. She raised her eyebrows at Erend, who nodded in self-satisfaction, “-and that's how you do it.”

Aloy nodded slowly. Erend was staring at her expectantly, and she raised an eyebrow. 

“What?”

“You don't seem very interested.”

“No, I am,” Aloy said, unconvincingly, “it bounced on the water. Impressive.”

Erend folded his arms and surveyed the ground at his feet. He bent at the knees and picked another pebble, similar in shape to the one he had shown her before. He held it out to her, suggesting she try it for herself. Aloy tried to replicate what Erend had shown her; pebble held between finger and thumb, thrown in an arc, and -  _ sploosh _ . 

“It didn't work,” she said, frowning, and grabbing another similar stone from the bank. She readied her arm, and Erend interjected.

“Try throwing it  _ away  _ from you instead of around you,” he suggested, and when she narrowed her eyes in confusion, stepped up to her. He placed his hand over hers, over the stone, and guided it back towards her chest.

“Now, throw it  _ away _ from you,” he said, the low timbre of his voice raising goosebumps on her neck. Aloy followed the motion he demonstrated and released the pebble across the lake, beaming widely when it skipped.

“There you go,” he said proudly, stepping away to launch his own pebble. Aloy felt a chill all of a sudden, and shivered to shake it off.

“This is fun,” Aloy remarked, releasing another pebble across the water’s surface, “but I don’t really see the point in it.”

“That is the point,” Erend replied. Aloy looked at him quizzically, and he grinned, “it’s  _ fun _ .”

  
  


Aloy stared down at the smooth rock in her hands. Erend was days away in Meridian, and a drunk and a liar besides, and she couldn't think of anyone else she'd rather share her moment of solitude with. 

She threw the rock into the river. 

* * *

 

 

Mother’s Watch loomed above her, nestled at the base of All-Mother, shrouded in clouds of cold mist. Goosebumps rose on Aloy’s skin, and every footstep she made sounded too loud in the quiet. Fires flickered in their pits, and none of the people surrounding them seemed to even be moving, or speaking. The fine hairs rose on the back of Aloy’s neck, and cautiously, she approached the Brave manning the guard post.

“What’s going on?” she asked, almost afraid to raise her voice to normal speaking level. The Brave regarded her with a closed expression on her face for a moment, before it softened, and she replied.

“Many Braves were wounded fighting the changed machines a few weeks ago,” the Brave replied, gazing out of the village with narrow, hardened eyes, “now, most of us are just sick.”

Aloy’s heart sank in her chest, and she clenched her jaw, thanking the Brave for her time. Setting off at a hastened pace, Aloy climbed the rise up to the mountain, trying not to stare too long at the withdrawn, hopeless faces of the Nora people that she passed. A surprising amount of them were gathered at the entrance to All-Mother in vigil, openly praying for forgiveness from their deity. Some of them were sobbing, clinging to each other in desperation. Aloy clenched her fists and strode purposefully past, not stopping for fear that she would never be able to pick herself up and carry on again.

The Brave on guard at the entrance to the mountain was one that she recognised.

“Varl,” she said, “I’m glad to see you’re well.”

Varl nodded in recognition. Physically, he looked as strong and resolute as he ever did, but his eyes were dulled with weariness.

“It’s good to see you, Aloy. Maybe there’s hope for us after all.”

“What do you mean?” she replied after a moment of unease. Varl, by nature, was a reserved person, but even that greeting was severely off-kilter for him.

“Well, you’re here, in the Embrace,” he said somewhat bitterly, “that must mean you’re here for a reason, and not just to visit.”

Aloy wished that she could tell him he was wrong, if not for the satisfaction then at least to prove that she wasn’t as bad of a friend as he seemed to believe. However, on this occasion, he was right.

“I need to get into the mountain,” Aloy told him, “can I speak with the High Matriarchs?”

Varl hesitated, “I don’t-”

“Aloy,” someone else said. An older woman appeared from the shadowy entrance to the mountain, her long hair braided down her back, and a disapproving look in her oddly familiar eyes, “you must be Aloy. No other would be so bold.”

“I’m sorry,” Aloy said, slightly bewildered, “do I know-”

“My name is Eida,” she said, folding her arms, “you’re aware that entering the sacred womb of All-Mother is a privilege, and not a right? You can’t  _ get into the mountain _ whenever you please.”

Aloy regarded Eida with a piercing look, her patience wearing thin. She would have to use her trump card, loathe as she was to do it. 

“I want to speak to  _ my mother _ to see if there’s a way to cure this illness,” she said sharply, “but if you don’t want that, then fine.” 

“Aloy,” Varl muttered in exasperation. Aloy ignored him, and opened her mouth to continue being sarcastic, but he spoke before her, “Matriarch Eida, Aloy is an envoy of All-Mother.”

“I remember,” Eida said, “she healed the corruption in the machines. Shame it didn’t stick.”

“Then I’ll just do it again,” Aloy said with conviction, bringing a smirk to Eida’s face.

“I suppose my mother wouldn’t turn you away,” Eida said, her critical gaze now tempered with respect, “just be sure you don’t upset her. Her sickness has made her weak.”

Aloy had no idea what - or who - Eida was talking about, but she didn’t have the desire to make a sick person any sicker. She nodded, and followed Eida through the entranceway and into the metal core of the mountain. 

Inside, completely airtight and lit only by candles, the air was warm and muggy. Aloy felt an anxious urgency all of a sudden; a desire to get into the Cradle and find out whatever she could-  _ if _ it was even still working.

“You said you hope to heal the sickness,” Eida said, her previously strong voice quiet and wary. Aloy watched her curiously. Varl had called her Matriarch, which meant that her sick mother was one of the High Matriarchs. Aloy felt all of the blood in her veins turn to ice, as she finally placed the familiar features on Eida’s face. 

“Mother,” Eida said. She had lead Aloy to a small chamber off of the main tunnel, lit by candles and scented with the scaled, egg-shaped seeds that fell from pine trees, “Aloy has come to see you.”

Aloy stepped into the alcove and swallowed the lump in her throat, her fears confirmed.

Teersa looked inconceivably small, lying in a cot without her ornate headdress. She was bundled up in furs and blankets, paler in the flickering orange light than Aloy had ever seen, her skin itself seeming translucent and flimsy. 

“Aloy,” Teersa said, smiling, “I must be dying if you've come to visit.”

“Don’t say that,” Aloy replied, choking on the words.

“Dry your eyes, Aloy,” Teersa said gently, reaching out her cold hand to lay upon Aloy’s, “I have done much more in this life than many others,” she said simply, “I am ready to go to my rest, when All-Mother calls.”

Aloy held Teersa’s hand tight in hers, trying unsuccessfully to stop herself from shaking.

“I need to speak with All-Mother,” she eventually managed to say, “I need to get into the mountain.”

Teersa nodded slowly, a smile on her withered lips. 

“Of course,” Teersa said, “go to your mother.”

“I will fix this,” Aloy promised, and Teersa’s smile turned sorrowful. 

“There is nothing to fix, Aloy. Death is a part of life as much as birth is.”

Tears welled in Aloy’s eyes, turning her vision blurry. Her voice stuck in her throat - she had so much yet to say to Teersa, but how could she even think the right words? How could she ever have enough time to ask all the questions she had? Blinking back her tears, she nodded.

“Thank you, Teersa.”

Teersa let go of her hands.

“Go now to your mother, Aloy, if Her strength and wisdom is what you seek.”

 

* * *

It was with some resistance that Lansra and Jezza lead Aloy into the sacred chamber where they believed All-Mother had vanquished the Metal Devil. Already mourning their dying sister, their eyes burned into the back of Aloy’s neck as she ascended the platform.

Aloy didn't even know if the Cradle was still operational, and if Lansra and Jezza - just Lansra, actually - were there to see her rejected by All-Mother in a time of need, what would that mean for the tribe? 

What would it mean for her? 

Would they shun her again?

More than that,  _ infinitely _ more than that, if Aloy couldn't fix the machines and cure the land, what would happen to all of the people who were sick? What would happen to Teersa?

Aloy stepped up to the door, tamping down her fear with clenched fists and gritted teeth. For a few moments, her heart pounded in her chest, and the door did nothing. Finally, the red beam appeared and swept down through her and, blissfully, the door spoke in clear, ungarbled words.

_ “Genetic identity confirmed. Entry authorised.” _

_ “Greetings, Dr. Sobeck. You are cleared to proceed.” _

The entire chamber was swallowed up in blue light as the door opened before her. Cold, dry air whooshed out towards Aloy, sweeping her hair back off of her shoulders, sending a chill across her skin. She strode purposefully forward, head held high, until the door closed again behind her, and she could feel the warm glow of the Matriarch’s candles no more.

_ “Welcome to ELEUTHIA Cradle-9.” _

_ “Network errors detected. Please proceed to the Control Room.” _

“‘Network errors’,” Aloy murmured under her breath, approaching the side door that lead to the Control Room, “that sounds about right.”

The door, unfortunately, would not admit her, and she was forced to go the long way round. The facility itself was almost exactly as she remembered: dark, and depressing. It didn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to figure out how the children that had become the first Carja had started to worship the Sun. 

The Control Room, once she finally got there, permitted her without hesitation. Everything lit up through her Focus, and at first, she thought she was about to see the human representation of GAIA, and her last message to Elisabet, again.

A window appeared in her Focus, filled with many smaller windows. They were named odd things, such as ‘Switch’ and ‘Datacenter’, but the one that caught her eye was ‘Cauldrons’. She followed it through by reaching for it in the air - never before had she been so glad to be used to her Focus and the way that it worked and stored information; it seemed that the Cradles and the Cauldrons all followed a similar structure. Instead of further windows appearing inside the Cauldron window, however, just the one appeared. It contained lines and lines of text, all under the heading of ‘Troubleshooting’, and a tinny voice sounded throughout the cavernous chamber.

_ “Multiple system errors detected. Cauldron facilities offline. Manual intervention required.” _

“‘Are all cables connected?’” Aloy read aloud, voice laced with frustration, angrily swiping through to the next option, “‘Have you tried turning it off and on again?’ This is useless…”

Aloy swiped through the air in an effort to make the increasingly ridiculous tips move on. Another message appeared.

“‘Call a Service Technician on 0-1-4--’ yeah, I doubt they’d show up.” she said, rolling her eyes, “‘Reinitialise System’. That might do something.”

_ “Please wait; System Reinitialisation in progress,” _ the tinny voice announced, and Aloy paced back and forth impatiently. She sat on a chair, and stood again, and walked to the end of the room and back again. Eventually, when the remainder of her patience had all worn thin, the voice sounded again.

_ “System unable to initialise due to unforseen Network error.” _

“Okay, how about… this,” Aloy muttered to herself, trying the next option. 

_ “Unable to connect to target computer due to unforseen Network error.” _ the voice repeated,  _ “Manual intervention required.” _

“‘Manual intervention’?” Aloy repeated in disbelief, “Manual intervention for what? Isn’t that what I’m doing  _ now _ ?!”

_ “Troubleshooting has completed,”  _ the tinny voice piped up, _ “Troubleshooting was unable to fix all of the errors found. Please contact your System Administrator.” _

All of the breath rushed from Aloy’s lungs, and her hopes sank like rocks in a river. She didn’t entirely know what was going on, but she could make an educated guess: the network that connected GAIA and the Cradles and the Cauldrons and everything else together had crashed. Without that network, there was nothing that she could do for the Cauldrons from where she was, and if she wanted to fix the Cauldrons, she would have to fix the network first. 

Aloy grimaced at that thought: she had brought down networks before, when she had crashed the Eclipse’s Focuses under Sylens’s guidance, but how could she ever hope to  _ fix _ one? 

She gasped, and her eyes widened.  _ Sylens! _ He was the only person who had studied the history of the Metal World more than her, was the only one who knew more about these machines than she did. If she could find him, he would probably have answers - and if she couldn't find him, there would probably be something at his workshop at the Bitter Climb that would help.

Triumphantly, Aloy disconnected from the machine’s interface. The Bitter Climb was a while away, but if she left Vern with Mera and really pushed it, she could make it there in a few days, perhaps a week. Her Focus logged her intended destination and spent a few moments calculating the quickest route for her as she raced from the room. This time, the side door out of the Control Room let her pass. Her small victory, however, was short-lived. 

As soon as she left ELEUTHIA-9, she was grabbed. Two Braves pinned each arm behind her back painfully hard, and walked her forcefully forward through the Metal tunnels. She gasped and yelled and writhed but they held fast, and she could only struggle so much before doing real damage to herself. She let them march her through the candlelit tunnels, scowling and clenching her jaw. 

“Wait,” she gasped, darkness in the corner of her eye catching her attention. The light in the chamber that Teersa lay in had been extinguished. Aloy began her struggling anew, shouting, “what happened to Teersa?!”

“Shut  _ up,  _ girl!” One of the Braves barked, yanking her arm hard enough to make her cry out in pain. 

Aloy was dragged out into the light of the setting sun before a crowd of chattering Nora people. In the middle kneeled Vern, his arms tied behind his body, and bruises on his face. One of the Braves holding her kicked her in the back of her leg, forcing her to her knees beside Vern, and the crowd began to protest. 

All at once, the people became silent. Aloy turned to see Lansra at the door to All-Mother, and for a blissful second, she believed she would be saved.

One look at the expression on Lansra’s face, however, and all of Aloy’s hopes were dashed.


	13. Thirteen

The bruises on Aloy’s arms had faded and healed by the time she caught sight of Meridian, sat on the horizon. It was flanked by long chimneys of smoke rising from the nearby desert, and was the closest thing she had seen to a pile of Scrapper salvage in weeks. 

The desert was too bright for her parched, aching eyes, but luckily, the sun was obscured behind thick clouds, and it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Hunger burned in her stomach, forcing her to finally stop for a break. She had a pounding headache, probably caused by the days she had spent practically not eating and not drinking and not sleeping. The little meat she had left had been overcooked to the point of being almost inedible, but it had been days since she had come across anything worth hunting. Her intention to go right through to the Bitter Climb didn't look like it was going to pan out how she had initially planned, with clean water hard to come by, and food even harder. 

If she wanted to make it there, climb the steep mountain trail, and not immediately die at the summit, she needed to stop in Meridian - however mixed her feelings were about it. 

It would give her a chance to let Avad know that his people were as good as dead, anyway.

Aloy finished off the remainder of her food supplies, washing it down her parched throat with a swig of water. She had rationed her water intake so strictly that the water she did have tasted stale, and a little bit bitter. It was still cleaner than what she had found in the the rivers and pools she had passed by, however.

Stretching her sore muscles, she got back to her feet. The first time - well, every time - she had made this journey, it had been on the back of a machine. She had never really thought about how hot the desert stone would feel underfoot, or how much the rocks would bite through the soles of her boots. 

Meridian itself was as quiet as every other town, camp and outpost that Aloy had passed through on her way back across the Sacred Lands and the Sundom. There was a skeleton crew of tired-looking guards on the main bridge, and they were the only people Aloy passed by before she got into the city proper. Even the market, which had been heaving just a few weeks previously, was sparsely occupied.

The guards outside the Palace smiled and nodded at Aloy in greeting, which she returned as honestly as she could. Nobody was there to accost her over her dirty skin and dust-coated clothes, and she approached the short queue of people waiting to see Avad without being forced into a bath - something she’d not managed for more than a year.

Marad appeared at her shoulder not long after she joined the end of the queue. He was not her favourite person to deal with, but at the same time, she was immensely pleased that some people had managed to avoid getting sick.

“We wondered if you were coming back,” Marad commented evenly, facing forward as if he were part of the queue himself, “you’re looking… feral.”

“It’s good to see you too,” Aloy replied flatly, “who’s ‘we’?”

“Myself, and some other people,” Marad non-answered, smiling pleasantly. Aloy rolled her eyes.

“I really don’t have enough patience left for this conversation, especially if you're going to talk in circles the whole time.”

Marad chuckled. A couple of the nobles ahead of her in the line twisted their heads toward Aloy, their expressions pinched at her rude tone. Marad turned his back to them, looking as if he was doing no more than surveying the distant landscape, and leaned toward Aloy, speaking directly in her ear.

“The Sun-king probably won't be able to see anyone until this evening, at the earliest,” he said lowly, “I would take you through to see him immediately, but he is attending other matters. He will know that you wish to speak with him. In the meantime,” he added, pausing to consider her, his eyes stopping on the places where her once form-fitting clothes now hung loose, “perhaps get something to eat. Maybe a bath.”

Aloy kept looking straight ahead, her stony expression a challenge to all of the people who so much as made eye contact with her. It didn't, however, stop the nobles from whispering amongst themselves.

“I have heard that the previous Sunhawk Khane Padish spends a good deal of her time at the Iron Hammer tavern,” Marad divulged, when she did not answer. Aloy glanced at him from the corner of her narrowed eyes. 

“Why are you trying so hard to get rid of me?”

That got his attention. Marad looked at her levelly.

“Perhaps you should take an expression of concern for what it is,” he said sternly, “many people are already ill, Aloy. We do not have space in the infirmaries to add you to their numbers.”

Chastised, Aloy nodded, lowering her eyes, and pursing her lips. It was probably the plainest thing Marad had ever said to her. She inhaled.

“I'll go and get some food,” she relented, and Marad dipped his head in recognition.

“We will send for you this evening,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching upward, “‘we’, of course, being myself and some other people.”

Aloy smiled for a moment despite herself, and watched him retreat up the steps before turning in the opposite direction.

 

* * *

 

The Iron Hammer had probably never been so empty.

The usual raucous atmosphere that surrounded the pub was absent, in its place a gaping void. Aloy had never really thought it to be a large pub, but as one of the tiny handful of people occupying it that afternoon, it felt as vast and lifeless as the Metal Ruins.

Talanah was sat at the bar, nursing a mug to herself, the barmaid stood opposite her. They had their heads bowed together, and both of them looked up at Aloy when she stepped inside. The barmaid and Talanah shared a quick look, before they untangled their fingers, and the barmaid left her post to go around and collect the empty tankards. Aloy approached her friend, her eyebrows raised and her expression bemused.

“Well, looks like Dai and Galand were wrong about her being interested in either of them. How long has that been going on?”

“A couple of months.” Talanah replied sullenly, staring into the depths of her drink. Aloy’s eyebrows raised again in genuine surprise.

“I didn’t even know.”

“Yeah, well,” Talanah breathed, “I guess you tend to miss stuff when you’re out getting yourself almost killed.” 

Aloy withdrew in surprise. She stared at Talanah, who still hadn’t done so much as look her in the eye, unable to form a response to the bitterness in her friend’s voice.

“What do you want, Aloy?” Talanah asked, sounding like she had never been so exasperated. Taken aback, Aloy’s eyebrows knitted together, and she tilted her head. 

“I… wanted to see you. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

Talanah snorted and shook her head, bringing her mug to her lips. “Right. Of course you did,” she muttered sarcastically, taking a swig.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just that the idea of you actually thinking about somebody other than yourself is kind of… unbelievable.”

Aloy swallowed to keep her voice from shaking. She would have thought that Talanah was joking, had the other woman not exuded seriousness. “What are you talking about?”

Finally, Talanah turned to her, regarding her coolly.

“You left on your own,” she said simply, before bitterly laughing, her eyes cast upward, “I mean, you left on your own,  _ again _ .”

Talanah stared up at Aloy, her brown eyes cold and hard, her nose wrinkled in anger. Aloy was so stunned that she couldn’t even form a response before Talanah continued. Her words were a little bit slurred, but it did nothing to soften the sting.

“Do you know how it feels to be overlooked, time and time again, and you pick yourself up time and time again, only for your friends to start doing it too?” she demanded, “damn, even Erend had a good enough reason for what he did. But you?” Talanah paused, and shook her head, “you don’t even care that you put all of us through a waking nightmare once already. You’re so  _ obsessed _ with the machines that you forget about  _ people _ .” 

“That’s not...” Aloy trailed off. Her stomach was twisted into knots, and none of the words she wanted to say would form in her mouth. She wanted to argue that all she ever  _ did _ was think about people, but as soon as she thought it, the realisation formed in her head - before she left for the Sacred Lands, Aloy had asked Talanah to get ready and meet her, and then she had just ridden off without so much as a backwards glance. Aloy didn’t know how that related to Erend, exactly, but she knew what it was like to be overlooked by people,  _ of course _ she knew. Aloy fled Meridian because she had been emotionally betrayed by her friend, and in doing so, she had inflicted the same pain onto Talanah.

Aloy worked her throat futilely, frozen as if she had been caught in a Snapmaw’s firing line. Talanah’s nostrils flared, her hands in white-knuckled fists atop the bar, before she seemed to visibly deflate.

Aloy choked, “I’m sor-”

“Don’t.” Talanah cut her off, not even meeting her gaze, her voice monotonous, “please leave, Aloy. I can’t-,” she stopped, inhaling forcefully, “I can’t be around you.”

* * *

 

 

Aloy spent the rest of the day at a loose end, too miserable to do anything. The Sun descended further and further toward the distant mountains, and still nobody was sent for her. Lingering listlessly in her rooms in the Palace, she intended on getting some food or some sleep to pass the time - but how could she eat when everything tasted like sand? How could she sleep when Talanah’s painful words rang in her ears?

Stood on the terrace, Aloy was staring out into Meridian when the knock on her door came. Erend stepped slowly into her room, cautious, immediately searching her out with his eyes. Aloy watched him blankly, too emotionally stretched out to fight the simultaneous tides of fondness and distrust that he evoked in her. He paused in the doorway, before seeming to make up his mind, and shutting the door behind him. After a moment, he spoke, and he sounded tentative and unsure of himself.

“I know that you’d probably prefer my head on a spike than on my shoulders,” he said, “and I can’t say I’d blame you, just…” he faltered for a moment. She saw the thick knot in his throat bob as he swallowed hard, “I had to see you. Please, don’t send me away.”

Aloy studied him with her sore eyes. A warm breeze toyed with the ends of her hair and the hems of her skirt. Erend shifted awkwardly under her plain scrutiny, edging closer to her.

“Why?” she finally croaked, her voice thick.

“Why should you not send me away?”

“No,” she disagreed with a minute shake of her head, and gestured loosely toward one of the columns of smoke in the desert, “why are they burning the dead?”

Erend halted halfway through the darkened room. He straightened his shoulders uncomfortably, not meeting her searching gaze.

“It’s how the Carja prepare them for burial,” he said softly, gently, as if the way he spoke could soothe the guilt she felt, “they say the Sun gave us life from its fire, and when we die, we should return to the flame.”

Frowning, she considered his words. Tendrils of the distant smoke curled and twisted up into the darkening sky, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Aloy was grateful that the wind was going the opposite way. She curled her fists, and inhaled shakily.

“Why did you lie to me?”

“I shouldn’t have,” Erend said immediately, “I went about it all completely the wrong way, and you didn’t even need me to, but I just-... I just wanted so badly to keep you safe.”

“Why?” she repeated. He deflated, his expression pleading, and breathed her name like it was a prayer. She didn’t have to press him further to know the truth; the depth of his feelings for her were screaming out in how he gravitated to her, in how he had sought her out despite fearing that she would reject him, in the look of relief that had passed over his face when he first caught sight of her, still alive and whole. Aloy didn't need to hear the words spoken. She didn't need her Focus to read what was so plainly on display.

The way he had treated her was wrong, unquestionably. But, if he was willing to admit that he was at fault, and if he was willing to learn… then maybe, Aloy would be willing to forgive. 

“I need to know that I can trust you. I need to know you won’t ever do that to me again.”

“Never,” he pronounced vehemently. Aloy considered him, and nodded.

“I won't send you away.” she promised. Relieved, Erend exhaled heavily. He stepped out into the evening light, approaching her at the stone balustrade. Like her, his clothes were looser on him than they had been when she left, and it appeared that sleep was a distant memory to him, too.

“I, uh… I didn't think you were gonna come back. I'm glad you did, I mean, it's good to see you- great to see you.” Erend said, stumbling over nearly every word, “Did you find anything at All-Mother that’ll help?”

Aloy grimaced, a lump rising in her throat, and gave a curt shake of her head.

“Nothing,” she said, “and I can’t exactly go back and double-check, either.”

Erend eyed her curiously.

“I uh… I did notice that your Strider wasn’t moored up where it usually is.” he said, shifting from foot to foot and rubbing the back of his neck, “if it’s because of me; I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t because of you,” Aloy replied. She would have to tell him the truth, as much as it pained her.

What had happened outside All-Mother was still difficult for her to remember, even after more than a week of travelling. Lansra had been incensed and determined, and without Teersa to offset her and her distrust of Aloy, Jezza had been easily persuaded to go along with whatever her ‘sister’ said. Aloy had knelt in the mud while her Strider was ‘sacrificed’, and almost had to beg for Vern’s life, all in the name of appeasing their Goddess. 

It was a miracle that the Nora had let both of them go in the end. 

“The Nora destroyed my Strider,” she replied mournfully, her fingernails biting into her palm, “and they cast me out.”

“They  _ what _ ?” Erend repeated in disbelief, a deep frown across his features, “why?”

Aloy shook her head and inhaled shakily, her watery eyes cast to the sky. 

“I think Teersa’s dead.”

Erend hissed a breath out through his teeth, and leaned back into his shoulders, the palms of his hands pressed flat on the top of the stone balustrade. He spoke after a pause, his voice subdued and solemn. “Teersa… the old lady who made you that lantern before your proving?” he asked, and when she nodded in the affirmative, swore under his breath, “and they blame you for  _ that _ ?”

“They're not wrong.” she replied. The words wavered in her throat, and the tears in her eyes threatened to spill over, “Teersa got sick because of the water, the water is diseased because the machines aren't there to keep it clean. The machines aren't there because I broke all of the Cauldrons.”

“Okay, first: there's no way they could have known you had anything to do with any of that.” Erend argued, his hand thrown up in the air, “and second: they know it was an accident, right? That it  _ wasn’t _ your fault?” 

“It doesn't matter,” she replied thickly, “if I hadn't broken the Cauldrons, then Teersa- then  _ all  _ of these people-”

Aloy’s knuckles turned white, and she trembled. If she hadn’t broken the Cauldrons, then all of the people being cremated in the desert below would still be alive. All of the people in the infirmaries wouldn’t be sick. Vern wouldn’t have been so quickly separated from Mera and their child, and Talanah wouldn’t hate her. 

Teersa wouldn’t be dead.

Aloy inhaled sharply, opening her mouth to continue speaking, and instead could only gasp. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to stop herself from shuddering, and ducked her head.  Beside her, Erend's armour creaked as he moved, and she felt tentative fingertips on her shoulder. When she didn't shrug him off, Erend enveloped her into his warm embrace. Against his neck, her sobbing was muffled, and she cried until her tears ran dry.

Night fell properly, the warm evening sun retreating behind the mountains and delving the city into torchlit darkness. They sat back against the wall of the palace, side-by-side, arms touching, alternating between hushed conversation and companionable silence.

“It's getting late,” Erend said, his voice a deep rumble in his chest, “I don't think you're seeing Avad tonight.” 

Aloy hummed in agreement and lifted her head from his shoulder, rubbing the crick that had developed in her neck. She was exhausted, but bawling it all out had made her feel much more calm and clear-headed. Not that it was any good to her.

“I don’t know what to do about all of this.” she lamented, rubbing her eyes with her palms.

“Well, I know what you can do,” Erend replied, “you can stop trying to do everything alone. Avad and Marad are good strategists, and Talanah is a good fighter. I was even known to swing a hammer around once or twice in my youth,” he added jokingly, “I’m sure between the five of us, we can come up with something.”

Aloy hummed thoughtfully. Honestly, the thought of strategising and delegating the things that would be necessary to fix the gaping issues with GAIA’s subroutines hadn’t occurred to her. It quickly occurred to her that his plan might not work, either.

“Talanah isn’t talking to me,” she admitted, “I don’t think she’s going to want to strategise anything.”

“She isn’t talking to me either,” Erend replied, “I don’t blame her; I’d be pretty pissed off at us too.”

Aloy watched a lone firefly dance around a lit torch, mulling over her next words carefully.

“I was supposed to take Talanah with me to look at the Cauldrons, but I left her behind,” she started, at length, “you left her behind too, didn’t you? When you came to get me from Daytower.”

Erend nodded slowly, eyes downcast.

“I shouldn’t’ve. I almost left without taking anybody to help me bring you back. I just… I guess the thought of you, hurt and dying, didn’t leave much else in the way of logic and common sense.”

There wasn’t anything she could think of to say in response to that, yet despite the bleakness of their conversation, she felt her chest flood with warmth.

Erend stood first, and offered his hand to her. She took it without hesitating, his skin as rough and callused as hers, and he drew her up to her feet. Their eyes met, their joined hands held between them.

“We  _ will _ figure it out,” he promised. 

“We better,” she countered lightly, and he smirked. His eyes looked between hers, and he ducked his head, pressing their lips together in a chaste kiss. Aloy's eyes closed of their own accord, and she felt the bristle of his cheeks and a pleasant quiver in her belly before she pressed back into him. He was warm, and comforting, and even though the kiss was borne of sadness, she found strengthened resolve in the thrill that it gave her.

Finally, he drew away again, his forehead against hers. She licked her lips, letting her eyes open, sinking slowly back down onto her heels. He gave her the same reverent look he had given her before, when he had helped her down from her Strider, and his mouth quirked up into a grin.

“Get some sleep,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her forehead. He lingered there for a moment, and added, “I’ll make sure Avad clears time to speak to you tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

Heavy footsteps thudded across the room, and Aloy felt panic clutch her chest.

"Stay with me," she pleaded, her voice small and feeble even to her own ears. Erend's shoulders slumped. 

"Aloy..." he started to say reproachfully, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

"No, not- not like that. I just... I just don't want to be alone.”

It was probably the most vulnerable she had ever willingly made herself, and for a few terrible seconds, she truly feared that he would leave her anyway. Erend gave a loud sigh and started to unbuckle the most uncomfortable-looking parts of his armour, facing her again. At the sight of his expression, at his smile and the fond look in his eyes, her fear dissipated.

“I’m sure I can spare two minutes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will do for now. I'll proofread in the morning and fix anything that's particularly terrible, but right now it's very late and I just want to get this posted because it's been long enough since I updated.
> 
> Sorry that this took so long. Getting everybody through these conversations in ways that shared all the information I wanted to share and had the outcomes I wanted to share was hard.
> 
> GETTING THEM TO FINALLY KISS THOUGH??? AAAAAHH!!! I'm sorry it wasn't all fireworks and like dry-humping (as much as I wanted it to be) but there's enough drama going on everywhere else. Having their first kiss be purposeful and grounding was important in this fic. There's more than enough time left for passion, yet.
> 
> Oh, hey, also, I've outlined a sequel. It is gonna be fun and like full of shagging. Let me know what you think of this hot mess of a fanfic so far so that I have motivation to write the sequel *thumbs up*


	14. Fourteen

“Aloy, you are charged with corruption in the highest order. You brought a thief and a snake amongst the tribe under false pretenses; a man who has lain with one of our Braves and left her with a fatherless child,” Lansra declared, “All-Mother sent us to you as a test, and ultimately, we have failed her. She punishes us by giving us disease, and famine.

“For your crimes against us,” Lansra intoned, raising her voice to be heard above the gathered crowd of angry Nora people, her hand stretched open toward where Aloy knelt in the dirt, “you will be returned from where you came.”

Strong hands grabbed at her arms, her friends standing by and watching as she was dragged back into the depths of the mountain, her screams echoing through the metal chambers. She was thrown through the door to ELEUTHIA, and was plunged into ice-cold darkness when the door shut behind her.

 

* * *

 

Aloy awoke with a start, heart pounding and chest heaving. It took her a moment to shake off the feeling of being hauled bodily through the corridors of All-Mother, and instead recognise the soft cotton sheets on her skin, and the smell of spices wafting in through the window. She was in her room in the Sun Palace.

With an exasperated groan, she flopped back onto the pillows. Evidently, being within the safety of the city didn't mean that she would be able to avoid the nightmares.

“It was just a dream,” she told herself, rubbing her head with the heel of her palm, “just a dream.”

Something shifted in the bed beside her, something large and human-shaped. Aloy froze, holding her breath, and the person spoke.

“Aloy?” Erend said, muzzily, following it up with a deep yawn, and a vigorous shake of his head, “ugh. What time is it?”

Aloy rolled onto her side to face him- or, to face his silhouette in the dark - the previous night becoming clearer in her mind. Erend had been reluctant to stay with her at first, but when they got talking, he quickly relaxed, and he settled in next to her as if… well, as if he belonged there. He had apologised more for his behaviour, and she said it was to be expected after what had happened to his sister.

“It wasn't because of Ersa,” he had disagreed. She had given him an odd, searching look at that, and he had reached for her, tucking loose hair behind her ear. He had said nothing more, and yet his small action had said everything.

Laying beside him on the bed, Aloy glanced over his shoulder, assessing the inky black night sky.

“Still a few hours from dawn,” she said, and he sighed.

“So much for not staying the night,” he grumbled. He scratched the hair on his head, and slowly sat up, “I better get going; people will talk.”

“So what?” Aloy asked, “let them talk.”

Erend huffed, and she caught his grin in the dark. The bed shifted as he stood, and footsteps made their way across the room. She sat up, following his path across the floor as he passed through occasional patches of moonlight.

“Believe me, I’d rather stay,” he replied, the creak of leather informing her that he was donning his armour again, “but things aren't so good, and I don't want to add more to Avad’s plate.”

Aloy frowned, and tilted her head. She didn't really understand what it had to do with Avad - she and Erend hadn't done anything, had just lain side by side all night, and it wasn't his business anyway - and she said as much. The creaking leather sound stopped. Erend hesitated before he started to explain to her what he meant.

It turned out that the Oseram and the Carja were not on as good terms as they had been when Aloy had left Meridian some three weeks previously. With the spread of disease and scarcity of machine parts, trading prices for common resources like wire and medicinal herbs had skyrocketed, and the Oseram and the Carja were both blaming the other for it all. Oseram Vanguardsmen were under increasing pressure from their respective clans to return home to help with the outbreak, and it seemed the Carja nobles would gladly see the back of them, despite the gaping holes it would leave in Meridian’s defenses. Erend and Avad were at the middle of it all, trying to keep the two tribes together, fighting what sounded like a losing battle.

“I've already lost a dozen men,” Erend lamented, buckling his wrist braces, “half a dozen have deserted, half a dozen more are in the infirmary, and a few of those- well.”

“Deserted?” Aloy repeated, trying not to dwell too much on the implications of what he had said at the end, for fear her guilt would swallow her whole.

“Tch, yeah. Three or four were new recruits, but it’s still a setback - half the Vanguard is made up of new recruits, these days.

“I’m more surprised at Brendt disappearing on me, didn’t think I’d ever see the back of him. Vern, too. It’s like loyalty doesn’t mean a thing anymore,” he said agitatedly, and she saw him gesture in the dark, throwing his hand up in the air. She shook her head, unaware if he could even see it.

“Vern’s in the Sacred Lands,” she told him, “he wanted to meet his son.”

“He's still there now?” Erend asked, and at her confirmation, added bitterly, “that's not much good to me.”

“It might not be any good to you,” she retorted hotly, “but the Nora tried to kill him for it.”

Erend fell silent, and Aloy picked at the thin cotton sheet that pooled in her lap.

“Sorry,” he said, finally, “there's… there’s a lot going on.”

Aloy hummed in agreement; she hadn’t anticipated the amount of changes in the Sundom in her absence, just as he likely hadn’t considered the reason for Vern staying as close to the Embrace as he could. For a moment she felt despair chill her to her core - their world was so monumentally broken, how could she ever hope to fix it? Was this how Elisabet had felt, staring down her own demise, with no foreseeable way out? Mentally, Aloy pushed away the traitorous thoughts she was having. She had fought worse odds against HADES and its army and had still come out the other side - she wasn’t alone then, and she wasn’t alone now.

Impulse welled up within her. Aloy slipped out of the bed and approached Erend where he stood across the room, reaching up when she drew close. Her palms found cool studded leather, and the rise and fall of his chest, and her lips found his. He grinned into her, and pulled her closer with his hand in the small of her back. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders and she melted into him, the strength and solidity of his body against hers warming her up from the inside. He made a noise in his throat, pulling away barely a fraction.

“Aloy,” he breathed raggedly. He then shook his head and kissed her again, anything he had been meaning to say forgotten. His hands roamed her body with barely-restrained hunger, touching her sides and her hips and her backside until he finally managed to rein himself in, however privately disappointed it made her. Eventually, he managed to extricate himself from her and slip away, but not before she weaseled another goodnight kiss from him first.

Aloy cocooned herself up in the bedsheets after that, grinning giddily, and cradling the precious warmth growing in her chest like it was a fire in a blizzard.

 

* * *

 

 

After Erend had left, she had dozed for a few hours in a bed that somehow already smelled like him. Then, rejuvenated, she managed to have a breakfast of bread and what must have been the last grapes in all of the Sundom, for how squishy they felt.

Well-rested, and with her stomach full for the first time in weeks, the discomfort of all of the sand and dirt stuck to her skin and clothes hit her full-force. She spent some time in search of the servants that usually forced her into a bath before she so much as stepped foot in the palace, but they were nowhere to be found. In their stead, she managed to persuade one of the other servants to spare her some clean water for bathing. They delivered a steaming basin to her, and as soon as she was alone again she shed her clothes and scrubbed until her skin was pink.

After that, clean as a new blade, Aloy eyed her dirty clothes with her nose wrinkled. She dressed in a knee-length tunic that had been left in her rooms - intricately embroidered, but still simple compared to most garish Carja fashion - and cleaned her things in what was left of the water in the basin. She hung everything out to dry in the sun on her terrace, amusing herself with the scandalised looks some of the nobles made when they caught her doing it.

Finally, when the sun was almost at its peak in the sky above, there came a loud rapping on her door.

“They won’t dry any other way,” she said preemptively as she opened the door to Aad, who was wringing his hands. He looked confused for a moment, before his eyes drifted to the open door to the terrace, and the sight of her clothes dripping onto the yellow stone. He cleared his throat.

“Sun-King Avad, fourteenth in the Line of Luminance, has requested your presence,” he said somewhat meekly, his eyes flicking between her and the terrace. Aloy raised an eyebrow, and Aad cleared his throat again, “it is not with regards to your underclothes.”

Hiding her smirk, Aloy gestured for Aad to lead the way. She was a little bit self-conscious with her legs uncovered, and kept her hand on her thigh so that the tunic didn’t ride up and reveal her still-healing scar.

Aad did not lead her out onto the veranda like Aloy expected him to; rather, he lead her to an inner hall which was grand both in size and in ornamentation. Avad was perched on his throne, his shoulders hunched, his head propped up with a hand over his eyes. The guards at the doors stood ramrod straight and sweating in the stuffy room. Her pulse leapt at the sight of Erend stood at Avad’s shoulder like a gruff-looking statue, and she just managed to swallow her nervous grin when their eyes met, instead glancing at Marad on Avad’s other side, who inclined his head slightly toward her.

Avad lifted his head from his hand and brightened upon seeing her, his welcoming smile doing nothing to hide the deep shadows under his eyes. He greeted her warmly, his voice echoing in the cavernous hall, and she stopped before the dais his throne sat upon, once again flattening the tunic against her thigh.

“I am relieved to see you again unscathed, Aloy,” Avad said, sparing her the usual phrases of Sun-worship that he often wove into his speech, “although, by your demeanor, I would wager that a solution to this problem has not been forthcoming.”

“It hasn’t,” she replied, shaking her head. Avad’s pleasant smile faltered a little, and she hurried to add, “I have a lead to follow, but it’s a long journey from here, and without a machine to ride, I don’t know how long it’ll take.”

Avad didn’t reply for a moment, steepling his hands in front of his face, his expression dark.

“Is there nothing that can be done in the meantime?” he asked. Aloy started to shake her head in the negative, and Avad’s hands fell again, “please, Aloy. Meridian is on its knees. Anything you think that might help, it will be done.”

Aloy chewed the inside of her cheek in thought. There was one thing she hadn’t tried, for good reason. She inhaled deeply to calm the anxious reaction she was having, just at the thought of what she was about to suggest.

“I could go back to the Cauldron,” she said, “I never got a chance to put right my mistake the first time, and I couldn’t access the system from the… facility I visited in the Sacred Lands.”

Tense silence fell over the room. Avad looked first to Erend, who had shifted on his feet almost unnoticeably at Aloy’s suggestion, and then to Marad, who had his eyebrow raised toward her.

“You believe there to be something there that may delay the effect of the lost machines?” Avad asked her when they didn’t say anything, leaning forward on the throne, palms pressed flat together, the tips of his fingers all pointing directly at her.

“I don’t know,” she replied honestly, “but I’ll know sooner than if I follow my other lead, I guess.”

“And you are willing?”

Did she have a choice? She nodded. Avad sat back in his throne, his shoulders straight again, as if a weight had been lifted. Lucky for some, she thought bitterly, as he again turned to the men stood beside him.

“You are both quiet, uncharacteristically so,” he said to them, “it worries me. I would value input from you both.”

Erend shifted again, while Marad stood still. Neither of them seemed to want to be the first to speak, and Aloy’s impatience was getting the better of her when Erend finally spoke.

“That place is crawling with machines,” he began reproachfully, and her skin felt like it was made of ice. Her hands balled into fists at her side - how _dare_ he turn on her again, how--

“You’ll need to hit it with force,” Erend finished, exchanging a look with Marad, “I need to take a look at it, but I can probably spare a handful of men to go along for backup- if you're, I mean, if you want backup.”

Oh. Not stopping her from going, then; supporting her. She lifted her chin a fraction, and loosened her fists.

“Backup would be useful,” she conceded. Erend smiled in relief.

“I will send word to Daytower,” Avad said, nodding his head toward Marad, “I’m sure Balahn will be able to prepare a team to flank you.”

“What about the Hunters Lodge?” Marad suggested, his gaze fixed on Aloy, who squared her shoulders, “their members must be at loose ends, itching for a hunt.”

Aloy faltered, and silence fell again. Marad cleared his throat.

“Perhaps-”

“I’ll talk to the Sunhawk,” Aloy interrupted. Avad nodded, satisfied.

“Shall we reconvene this evening?” he said, hiding his order beneath a question. Aloy wanted to get going as soon as possible, and it must have shown on her face, but neither of the other men argued with the Sun-King.

Convincing any of the Lodge’s Hawks to go along with her was going to take time, in any case.

 

* * *

 

 

After being dismissed, Aloy left the palace at a brisk pace, heading straight for the Hunters Lodge. She hadn’t been introduced to the Sunhawk that replaced Talanah yet, but she had heard snippets of gossip about him while she was in the infirmary - he was apparently fair, and rational. Hopefully that would be enough, and hopefully convincing him to aid her would inspire the other Hawks and Thrushes to follow.

Ligan greeted her solemnly at the door. The Lodge was sparsely populated - more populated than the Hammer had been the previous day, but still more empty than Aloy was used to - and directed her toward the Sunhawk without much prodding. The new Sunhawk was posted upstairs, as both Ahsis and Talanah had been, and it wasn’t until she saw the stony expression on the man’s face that she realised she _had_ met him before. The new Sunhawk was Palaved, one of the few Hawks who had supported Talanah’s bid for the title.

Getting his attention was not hard; it looked like he was mostly left alone by the Lodge’s members, and he had her fixed with his hard expression as soon as she ascended the stairs. Aloy quickly reminded herself that angry-looking was Palaved’s usual mood.

“Thrush,” he said, not unkindly, “it is good to see you among our numbers once again. Since the loss of the machines, we have not been as frequented as we once were.”

“Well, I know where there are probably some machines that need hunting,” she said, cutting right to the point, “if you know anyone willing to come with me.”

Palaved crossed his arms, and leaned back against the railing.

“What kinds of machines?”

“The last time I was there, it was a Ravager,” she said, gesturing with her hands, “a _big_ one.”

It didn’t look like convincing Palaved would be as easy as she thought. He seemed wary, even suspicious, of her. Even showing him the red scar on her thigh wasn’t enough to persuade him; he was being more considerate of his Hawks’ lives than Ahsis, or even Talanah. Aloy sighed, and glanced around herself to ensure that they weren’t being overheard.

“The area where this machine patrols is where the mutations all started,” Aloy said lowly, “I need to get there to try and fix it.”

Palaved studied her, and she stood under his piercing gaze for much longer than she was really comfortable, before he finally nodded.

“I will raise the call,” he said, “don’t be surprised if all of the Lodge’s members wish to assist you,”

“That would be fine. The more the merrier.” Aloy said, nodding to him, “I’ll be back in a few hours for rough numbers.”

There was one more person she needed to convince.

 

* * *

 

 

The only person at the training ground that afternoon was Talanah. She was sparring with a wooden figure, covered from head to toe in desert dust, and had discarded her small ornamental headpiece. One of the training spears lay broken on the floor, and Aloy eyed it nervously as she approached. Talanah, with a second training spear, lay into the wooden dummy, striking it fast and hard, and Aloy wondered how she could keep up that much force without jarring her bones. Aloy was barely five feet away when Talanah spun around, and she ducked hurriedly just before the spear whipped through the space where her head was. Aloy grabbed half of the broken spear and used it one-handedly to parry Talanah’s strikes. She was still healing, and Talanah was fast; Aloy was struck hard on the upper arm, and she yelped, dropping her weapon. Talanah glared at her, breathing harshly, and drew back her spear.

“I thought I told you to stay away from me,”

“You did,” Aloy confirmed, “I never was good at doing what I’m told.”

Talanah snorted humourlessly and turned back to her training, the force of her strikes not diminished in the slightest. Aloy stood and watched her, mulling over what she would say.

“I’m going back to the Cauldron,” she finally announced, “with backup, this time. We’re leaving in the morning.”

“Of course you are,” Talanah replied, slightly out of breath, “thanks for stopping by.”

“Talanah,” Aloy said pleadingly, “I’m sorry for running off alone. You’re right; I’ve been self-centred, and I took advantage of your friendship. I should have stopped to consider the consequences of my actions.”

The noise of wood clashing with wood stopped, and Talanah stood with her back still turned, her shoulders rising and falling with her heavy breathing. Aloy waited anxiously for her to say something.

“You should have,” Talanah agreed curtly.

Aloy stepped forward, nearer to her. Sand stuck to Talanah’s sweaty skin, and she dragged her arm across her brow. Aloy held out her waterskin in offering.

“To tell you the truth, I’m a little scared to face that Ravager again,” Aloy admitted, “ _more_ than a little scared. I’m going to have some of the Vanguard and Hunters Lodge at my back, but I don’t know how I feel about being covered by strangers. I’m not up to strength, not even close.

“I need you there with me, Talanah,” said Aloy emphatically, “this might be the only shot I’ve got at getting back in that Cauldron before any more people die. All of this,” she gestured toward the river, and the city above them, “will only get worse.”

Talanah shrugged off Aloy’s offered waterskin, and turned her back again.

“I’ll go with you,” Talanah conceded finally, “but as your Hawk; not as your friend.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent most of this week reading other HZD fanfics and being like highly critical of this story and not wanting to write any more of it yay that was fun let's not do that again.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has read, and an extra thank you to those of you who have left me comments. You guys were literally the only reason I sat down to get this chapter out.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the fluff *throws glitter*


	15. Fifteen

Sleep came fitfully to Aloy that night. Every time she closed her eyes, red light bled through her eyelashes, and the creak of a door somewhere in the Palace sounded like the predatory rumble of a Ravager. Her gut twisted with anxiety, and she fought to regulate the speed of her breathing. When she did manage to sleep, she woke frequently with a pounding heart and sweat-coated skin, her chest heaving.

After speaking to Talanah, Aloy had spent the remainder of the previous evening and a good chunk of the night strategising in the War Rooms. It was crowded in Erend's office with the four of them in there, working with a map of the Sundom spread between them. It had transpired that Palaved would not be taking part in the mission, and instead, a Hawk by the name of Basma would be at the head of the Hunters Lodge party. Aloy had not met Basma before, but she seemed canny, and had years of leadership under her belt- far more than Aloy could boast. Even with all the support in the world, Aloy was dreading going back to Cauldron Rho.

When the time came to rise from bed and get ready for the journey, she was in a decidedly bad mood. She scarfed down her breakfast - more bread and overripe fruit - and dressed in her clean clothes, scowling hard enough to burn holes.

There were still a few last-minute details that needed to be ironed out, so Aloy headed towards the War Rooms once more, stifling a yawn into the back of her hand. Erend still hadn't had a solid number of Vanguardsmen that he could spare, and something told her that she wasn't going to be pleasantly surprised when he finally did. 

Marad was already there speaking to Erend when Aloy invited herself in, the two of them looking far more well-rested than she felt. 

“Aloy, good timing,” Marad said, “I have just received word from Balahn. He can have a party of five ready to flank you once you are within range of the Cauldron.”

“Five,” Aloy repeated, mentally adding everything together. With the Hawks who had volunteered, that gave her eleven fighters at her back. She nodded; it would have to do, “and the Vanguard?”

“Another three,” Erend said, still studying the map spread out on his desk. Aloy frowned, and walked around to stand beside him, looking at the same map.. 

“Yesterday it was four- who dropped out?”

Erend shifted uncomfortably in his seat, directing a dark look towards Marad. Marad cleared his throat. 

“Someone needs to remain and guard the Sun-King,” Marad said to her, “Erend has graciously volunteered himself.”

The glare that Erend had fixed on Marad did not waver. 

Volunteered. Right. 

Marad glanced at them both in turn, visibly unfazed by the stony expressions directed toward him. 

“If you will excuse me, I have other business to attend,” he paused halfway out of the room, and said to Aloy, “may the Sun light your path.”

The door shut smoothly behind him, and Aloy let out a dissatisfied huff.

“He wouldn't accept Galand as a guard,” Erend explained bitterly, rolling his eyes, “please tell me you got more Hawks to come with you.”

“Nope, still only six. I know some of the Thrushes wanted to join us, but none of them showed up to brief this morning.”

“Palaved must have advised against it,” Erend commented, “he can't spare the numbers either.”

Aloy mulled over everything. It was the same across the board; none of the captains or officers wanted to send their men, because there were hardly any men left. Her eyes drifted up from the map to catch Erend watching her intently. Something inside her felt pleasantly warm.

“You seem nervous,” he said as explanation, when she raised her eyebrow quizzically. Aloy shrugged. 

“Last time I was there I was nearly killed,” she pointed out, glancing out of the window at the morning desert, “I'm not exactly delighted to be going back.”

Outside the window, the sun was peeking over the distant mountains, and the people that still remained in the city were going about their lives. Erend rose from his chair and leaned past her to close the shutters. Aloy raised her eyebrow at him again, a grin tugging at her lips.

“What are you doing?” she asked coyly, when he pulled her closer with his hand on her hip.

“Saying goodbye,” he murmured, touching the tip of his nose to hers, their breath mingling in the air between them. Aloy smiled and leaned up on her tiptoes toward him, pulling him down by the neck. She kissed him hungrily, pressing herself up into his broad chest, the very tips of her fingers and toes tingling.

Someone knocked the wooden door and Erend jerked his head away from her. Aad poked his head in and froze at the sight of them in their embrace. When nobody did anything, Aad started to speak. 

“Hi-is Radiance, the fourteenth Sun-King--”

“What does Avad want?” Erend interrupted exasperatedly. Aloy's hand fell away from the back of his neck.

“He-e requests your presence,” Aad replied hurriedly, “the soldiers are ready.”

“We’ll be there in a minute.”

The door slammed shut behind Aad, and Aloy let out the laughter she had desperately been holding in. 

“I think he peed himself a little,” she said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. 

“Wouldn't be the first time,” Erend chuckled, tugging her close once more, “come here so I can say goodbye again.”

After finally tearing herself away, Aloy rushed to the rendezvous point just outside of Meridian Village. She had had a couple of other things to check up on first, and she managed to arrive just as the briefing (at least half of which consisted of “do as Aloy says and you probably won't get killed,”) was wrapping up. The fighters - Vanguard and Hunters Lodge members alike - were all much younger than she had anticipated. It occurred to her then that the Hawks had probably only recently been promoted because their mentors had--...

Squashing that line of thought down, she surveyed the small gathering again, her heart dropping when she realised there was no sign of Talanah. Aloy swallowed her disappointment, and once Erend and Basma had finished, she stepped up before the gathering.

“I don't know for certain what we will face when we get to the Cauldron” Aloy announced, “we will travel together, for the most part, and when we are within half a day’s range, I will scout ahead. Any questions?”

Galand, who was stood beside his fellow Vanguardsmen, gasped all of a sudden, and his face dropped. The other two Vanguardsmen started to howl with laughter, bending at the knees. Aloy looked over her shoulder to see what was so funny, and caught sight of Talanah walking up to meet them, her cheeks pink and her expression annoyed. Aloy turned back, confused, as Erend barked at his men to simmer down. He was grinning too, however, and gladly accepted a generous pouch of shards from Galand. Aloy shook her head, resigning herself to never quite understand the workings of an Oseram.

“Now that Talanah’s stopped making out with her girlfriend,” Erend said loudly, beaming at Galand, “we’ll see you slackers in about a week.”

 

* * *

 

 

Three hours into the march, and Aloy's head was pounding. One of the Oseram had said something to one of the Carja, and both sides had been bickering ever since. Aloy and Basma had made efforts to shut them all up, which only worked for a short time before the soldiers started arguing again. 

It was like trying to ferry a herd of errant children across the desert, not a group of soldiers. 

“-this would all go much quicker without those feather-heads here,”  groused one of the Vanguard.

“That's not what your mother said last night,” one of the Hawks retorted. Aloy put her hand to her face and sighed with exasperation. Part of her couldn’t wait to get within range of Balahn’s Carja guard, and the other part dreaded the extra arguments it would cause. The whole thing would be much less unbearable if she had had someone to talk to, to drown out the bickering, but Talanah hadn’t budged from her spot at the back of the line. If Aloy left the point to go and talk to her, it would probably just make matters worse.

“Don’t TOUCH my SPEAR!”

“Don’t touch my HAMMER, then!”

“I wouldn’t have to touch your hammer if you weren’t swinging it around like a halfwit!”

“Who are you calling a halfwit, you--”

“ALL of you, give it a  _ rest _ \--” Aloy interjected loudly, whirling around. Her eyes widened as an arm snaked around her throat and crushed her back against a hot, sweaty body. Behind the Hawks and Vanguard, ten or fifteen bandits emerged from behind bushes and boulders, like maggots appearing from a corpse. Mentally, Aloy cursed out a string of profanities. Her ‘backup’ had been so noisy and disruptive that she hadn’t even noticed that they were walking right into an ambush.

_ This _ was why she worked alone.

“Let her go!” Talanah was the first to yell, her spear held forward in a white-knuckled grip.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the bandit who had her in a headlock snarled in warning, as some of Aloy’s soldiers reached for their weapons. She choked as the pressure was increased on her windpipe, and tears sprang into her eyes. Her soldiers froze, staring at Aloy and the bandit with anger and fear. Aloy’s eyes started to feel cottony in her head, and her arms started to feel sluggish. 

Aloy kicked back, hard, right into the bandit’s kneecap, and blessedly, he released her. He stumbled backward and she rammed into him again, burying her spear in his neck before she had even finished catching her breath. Behind her, chaos erupted as the Hawks and Vanguardsmen attacked the bandits, and the desert was immediately filled with the sound of clashing steel.

The fight didn’t last long; the bandits were starving and dehydrated and desperate. The soldiers fought well and efficiently, and they didn’t waste time making the bandits suffer, instead dispatching them with well-practised accuracy. 

When the last body had fallen, the soldiers cheered. Aloy’s gut twisted in disgust and she stalked forward, eyes blazing. Basma caught sight of the look on Aloy’s face and called for her Hawks to pull themselves together, but it was too little too late. Aloy ripped a spear from a fallen bandit and hurled it forward, embedding it deep into the ground not two feet from the nearest soldier, and they all fell silent. Aloy stood and scrutinised each of them in turn, her eyes narrowed and her chest heaving.

“That could have been avoided,” she spat, her voice hoarse and raspy, and she pointed at them, “you set aside your differences,  _ now _ , or you turn back. I don’t have time to be a babysitter.”

The march that followed was deathly silent, and Aloy kept her Focus activated. She had underestimated the presence of bandits, and wouldn’t make that mistake again. They walked all day, bedded down for the cold night, and resumed in the morning without any more interruptions. The silence was unnerving, but it was much better than the arguments of the day before.

“Wait-” Aloy croaked, and cleared her throat, “wait here,” she said to Basma and Talanah, who still wasn’t speaking to her, but who had at least started to walk just a few steps behind her instead of bringing up the rear of the party out of avoidance, “I’ll scout ahead, see what I can see.”

Basma nodded, and began issuing orders to her men. Talanah lingered, however, and finally broke her silence.

“You’re going alone.” she said - a statement, and not a question.

“I couldn’t sneak up on a deaf person with this group right behind me,” Aloy replied, an eyebrow raised.

“Probably not,” Talanah agreed. She glanced toward where Aloy knew the Cauldron lay, and then back at Aloy herself. “If you haven't returned by nightfall, I'm coming after you.”

“Alright,” Aloy agreed, after a moment's pause. She wanted to suggest that Talanah just come with her anyway, but Aloy guessed they weren't there yet. She gestured to the party, some of whom were starting to squabble again, “feel free to knock their heads together if they get annoying.”

“Gladly.”

With nothing else to say, Aloy unloaded the gear that she wouldn't need to take with her, and set off alone across the final stretch of desert. 

 

* * *

 

 

The rainforest was as humid as ever, and Aloy was in real danger of dehydration with all the sweating she was doing. She counted no less than five Watchers patrolling the entrance to the Cauldron, all of them mutated and acting strangely. Like the last time she had been there, Aloy watched the Watchers making their erratic, weaving paths through the undergrowth with her Focus, making sure to keep track of each one. Taking down any of them risked alerting the others, and she couldn’t afford for that to happen. Without first getting inside the Cauldron, she didn’t know what else had gotten between her and the massive Ravager inside.

Breathing shallowly, Aloy crept as close as she could to one of the Watchers, keeping track of where its packmates were with half an eye. Her heart was in her throat, pumping adrenaline through her veins. Her grip on her spear was sweaty, and she carefully wiped her hands on her leggings before readjusting her grip. When the Watcher paused, she held her breath entirely. It turned away, and she struck, jabbing forward with her spear so that the override module made contact with the machine’s metal body. Quickly, and with practised fluidity, she overrode the mutant Watcher, its twin heads shining their light straight onto where she hid in the grass.

The other Watchers looked over curiously at the noise, the blue light in their eyestalks turning amber. Aloy ducked lower and pointed her newly overridden Watcher in their direction, nudging it forward. The hostile Watchers approached her machine as she withdrew, and she used the ensuing fight as a distraction, hurrying over the Watchers’ patrol lines and down toward the mouth of the Cauldron.

The Cauldron’s door was still open from her last visit, with sand and dead leaves scattered in the entryway. Dried blood was splattered on the metal floor, untouched by the elements, and Aloy had to tear her eyes away from it all. She drew her hand away from her thigh and curled both hands into fists before stepping all the way inside the Cauldron, her Focus activated and ready. She wasn’t far inside when she picked up more signals, Scrappers and Snapmaws and Longlegs, all together, looking like they were all on top of one another. Aloy swore under her breath; she had forgotten that the machines would read as duplicates through her Focus. The Watchers hadn’t looked any different just minutes before, but for some reason, it was back to malfunctioning. Aloy counted the machines and turned back; there wasn’t any way for her to get any deeper into the Cauldron without being discovered, and she wasn’t keen on adding more of her blood to the walls of the cavern.

Luckily, the four remaining Watchers had their backs turned while she darted up and over the sheer rock wall out of the Cauldron and into cover. Keeping low, she snuck through the grass and the undergrowth, ducking down whenever a blue beam of light swept around in her direction. Eventually she came across the remains of her overridden Watcher, its two heads lay broken and shattered on the forest floor. Again, the Focus just identified it as what it was; perhaps it had something to do with whatever extra parts the other machines had inherited? Either way, she didn’t have much time to contemplate. Aloy scavenged what she could from the machine’s corpse - she had been getting low on shards, in all honesty - and slunk away from the Cauldron, her mind abuzz. 

Altogether, she had counted four Watchers outside, with a further five inside. There were also six Scrappers to contend with, and maybe Snapmaws and Longlegs too, not forgetting the Ravager that had almost managed to kill her before she had had the chance to fight back. Erend was right - the Cauldron was  _ crawling _ with machines. Hopefully, the fighters she had would be enough to at least give her time to get back into the Control Room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Send me HZD prompts on my [tumblr!](http://spooopygames.tumblr.com/ask) I have anon turned on :)  
> If you want to prompt but dunno what to ask for, [here's a list of 200 to get you started.](http://spooopygames.tumblr.com/post/164418452016/nearly-200-writing-prompts-feel-free-to-reblog)


	16. Sixteen

Aloy heard the soldiers before she saw them, but as they noticed her approach, all of the bickering died down. She had only been gone for a couple of hours at most, so it was good to see that the soldiers had at least been efficient in setting up a proper camp while they squabbled.

“How does it look back there?” Basma asked, sidling up to her right away. Aloy sighed in dissatisfaction and surveyed the soldiers again from afar.

“Maybe one machine per fighter,” she replied, and shrugged, “maybe twice that. The machines are definitely mutated.”

“Are we still pushing forward?”

“Don’t really have a choice.”

Basma didn’t reply for a moment, her expression calculating. She stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled once, hard, bringing all of the Hawks to attention. The Vanguard and Carja guard all soon followed. Basma relayed the report that Aloy had given before once again going over the tactics: they would approach the Cauldron as a unit and then split up, a few of the fighters tasked with going inside the Cauldron and drawing the machines out into the open. This would give Aloy the chance to get inside and do her part without interference.

“Like smoking out a hive,” Galand said, gleefully. Then, when more than a few of the party gave him odd looks, said, “what?”

One of the Hawks opened their mouth to make a comment back, but Basma cleared her throat pointedly, and they quickly shut up.

After some final last-minute preparations, the party followed Aloy through the dense jungle. The chattering had all but ceased, and the tension in the air was as thick as the humidity. Aloy kept her Focus activated again, unwilling to lose any element of surprise they had in their favour. When they were in range of the Watchers, she readied a Hardpoint arrow in her bow, hearing the echoing whisper of more bows being drawn behind her. She exhaled evenly and let her arrow fly.

Almost at the same time as each other, two of the four Watchers fell. The other two, immediately alerted, began to shriek. Aloy was assisted in dispatching another one and she rolled to avoid being hit by the last one as it charged the group. Aloy sprinted away perpendicularly, going wide in one direction as many of the fighters went the other. The fighters that had been tasked with flushing out the machines ran dead forward, dropping down into the cavern and disappearing inside the Cauldron without even stopping.

The five Watchers that had been inside the Cauldron soon spilled out of the open entryway and Aloy managed to pick off two of them relatively easily from her higher ground - it was like shooting fish in a barrel. She was feeling confident for a few sweet seconds until the Scrappers emerged and scaled the sheer wall with nothing more than a few short, rapid jumps.

Now that they were in the open again, Aloy was able to scan the Scrappers properly. When her Focus told her they were nothing more than ordinary Scrappers, Aloy felt her hopes lift - then, the one she was looking at moved, and she caught onto the film that covered their metallic bodies like a second skin. It can’t have been more than an inch thick in any one place, but it was full to burst with Chillwater. If the skins exploded, the resulting Chillwater blast would easily be enough to cause painful ice burns, or even frostbite.

“Don’t pierce the Scrappers!” she yelled, hoping that she would be heard. She didn’t have time to stop and make sure, however; she ducked and rolled just in time to avoid getting her head cleaved off. Gathering her feet under her, Aloy pushed up hard and rolled further away, righting herself just as she heard the telltale sound of Chillwater exploding. She spared a glance westwards toward the blast; a couple of Carja guard were flanking a frozen Scrapper, all of them with ice forming on their shields and armour. 

Aloy narrowly dodged another strike from the Scrapper she was engaging and jabbed forward with her spear, knocking off some of its facial plates and shooting it full of sparks. She yanked out her spear just in time for Galand to barrel past, flattening the Scrapper’s head with his massive hammer. The Scrapper registered in Aloy’s Focus as  _ Destroyed _ , the Chillwater skin undisturbed, and she raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“That’ll do it,” she said appreciatively. Galand raced off toward the nearest Scrapper, and Aloy turned her attention toward the Cauldron, her fists clenched at her side. She felt the ground pulse and jump under her feet, and the soldiers they had sent ahead into the Cauldron retreated out again. 

The pulsing footsteps stopped, the soldiers scattered, and the massive Ravager pounced through the open Cauldron door. It landed hard on its four massive paws and the ground shook right up to Aloy's knees. Behind it appeared six Longlegs, sluggish under the heavy weight of their too-large Chillwater sacs. She reached behind her to draw more arrows, but her wrist was grabbed. Aloy whirled around to see Talanah, stood so close she could almost see her own reflection in Talanah's wide eyes.

“Go,” Talanah said, “we’ll hold them off.”

“There's too many!” Aloy protested. 

“Better not make this a wasted trip, then!”

Aloy halted, her breath all rushing out of her at once. She gripped Talanah's arm with hers and gave her friend a single, solemn nod. They separated and passed each other, going in opposite directions - Talanah to join the fray, and Aloy to skirt the edge of the cavern. A Longleg charged at her, its head held at half mast due to the heavy weight around its shoulders, and Aloy swerved, ducking and rolling to avoid getting hit. She heard shouting behind her - the sound of the machine getting tangled up in a fight with someone else - and even though it went against her very nature, Aloy ducked into the Cauldron, leaving everyone else to fight the machines.

* * *

 

 

Aloy jogged through the long tunnels that wove their way through the Cauldron, the thick scar on her thigh pulling tight under her leggings. The soldiers that had ventured in ahead of her had cleared everything out; no machines appeared to ambush her, and she made good time to the Heart. Even if the structure hadn’t been laid out in such a linear way, and even if she had gotten lost, all she would have had to do was follow the bloodstains she had left behind months before. 

Knowing that the Ravager was outside did nothing to stop the goosebumps racing up her back, and she shook out her arms at her sides to quell the anxiety that bubbled up inside her. It took her a moment to locate the Control Room, off to the side of the Heart of the Cauldron, well-hidden in the darkness. The door that had admitted her with a jerking, glitching voice before was broken, smashed completely away from its metal frame. Aloy paused for a moment, assessing the damage. It must have been done when the Ravager had chased her.

Swallowing the remainder of her nerves, Aloy strode back inside the Control Room, her head held high. Luckily, the door was the only thing in the room that was damaged, and all of the machines that lined the walls were intact. Aloy found the keyboard she had used before, the one that controlled the core machine, but tapping the keys on it did nothing. She hissed out through her teeth in frustration.

“Why won’t this stupid thing switch on?” she complained, dropping the keyboard back onto the console. At her words, the projection appeared once more, and she blinked hard as her eyes adjusted to the sudden light.  _ ‘Use Keyboard’ _ appeared, and Aloy raised her eyebrows in surprise. 

Once again, pressing the largest key on the keyboard made several lines of text appear. This time, however, it was all legible, and made sense to her.

“ _ ‘HEPHAESTUS-RHO has experienced an unexpected shutdown. Would you like to restore from the last working configuration?’ _ ” Aloy read aloud, selecting ‘yes’ from the list, “that sounds like the right thing to do, I guess.”

More text appeared, too rapid for her to read. Bit by bit, things started to happen. The room lit up gradually as the other, smaller, projections came back on, and lines and lines of actual text started to appear on the projection before Aloy - the garbled mess that she had seen before she tampered with it all was gone. Even the tinny voice that sounded overhead was back to normal.

“ _ Hephaestus-Rho has successfully recovered. All systems are operational. Beginning recovery of Hephaestus-Psi-through-Zeta. Welcome back, Doctor Sobeck. _ ”

“Oh, you’re-,” Aloy breathed, eyebrows drawn together in disbelief as several readouts lit up in a happy purple, “you’re  _ kidding _ me. You’re fixed? Because I turned you off and back on again?”

The machine, of course, didn’t answer her. Bitterness rose up within her like bile - if she hadn’t been struck down before, if she had resolved to investigate the Cauldron sooner- 

“ _ Multiple system errors have been detected, and functionality has been restored. Production of terraformers will resume after the biofuel generator is back up to capacity. _ ” 

Aloy felt hope grow inside her. She didn’t have to understand all the words to know what it meant; in a few hours, hopefully, the Cauldron would be making machines again.

Hearing the approach of footsteps -  _ when _ had the sound of fighting stopped? - Aloy wasn't surprised when Talanah called for her. 

“In here,” she replied distractedly, still watching the readouts as they appeared. 

“The machines stopped fighting,” Talanah reported, slightly out of breath, when she found the room Aloy was in. Aloy spared her a quick glance - she was bleeding from a couple of gashes, the worst one on her lip, which was swollen. “Was it you?”

“I… think so,” Aloy replied. She turned back to the projection and tapped through some different menus. Most of it meant nothing to her, however, “I'm not really sure what I did.”

“Well, if you're done, we should probably get going before the machines decide to turn nasty again.” 

“I'll be right there…” Aloy said, trailing off when something caught her attention. Talanah stepped up beside her, but without a Focus, she couldn't see what Aloy saw. 

“What's it saying?”

“I'm… I think I can make it communicate with my Focus,” Aloy murmured. She changed a setting and stepped away from the console, her fingers at her temple. The usual Focus interface appeared, but with one additional menu:  _ Network _ . Heart in her throat, Aloy followed through the list, swiping down and tapping the air. Talanah probably thought she looked insane, but then, Talanah was probably used to her using her Focus. Aloy's eyes widened and she beamed in triumph.  

“I can access the Cauldron through my Focus now,” she said gleefully. Talanah blinked at her. 

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I might be able to access all of this,” she gestured around the room, “from Meridian, or the Embrace, or… anywhere.”

“So, if this happens again,” Talanah said, eyebrows hiked up, “you won't have to come here to fix it?”

Aloy nodded absently, her attention drawn by a new message that had appeared. Out in the main chamber of the Cauldron came the screech and whir of machinery, and the surprised shouts of the soldiers. Talanah was the first out of the room, with Aloy hot on her heels. 

The override control column in the centre of the room had descended again, and the huge arm-like machines were moving back and forth like a four-legged spider spinning a web. Aloy immediately realised what it was doing. 

“Clear the way!” she ordered. The soldiers wasted no time arguing and immediately spread out, backs to the cavern walls. 

“What is it doing?” Basma asked under her breath from Talanah’s other side, a tone of wonder in her voice. The arms were building up from the ground simultaneously, and slowly, four metal hooves began to form. Aloy almost felt like she would collapse from the relief. 

“It's making machines.”

 

* * *

 

It didn’t take them long to clear out of the Cauldron and the surrounding area, all things considered. They hadn’t lost any soldiers, which was good, and all of the injuries sustained were treatable, which was also good.

After scarfing down her rationed dinner, Aloy separated herself from the main party and set herself up above the chasm, her eyes trained on the open door to the Cauldron. It was a close night, in the humid jungle, and she had no need for a fire to keep her warm. She folded her arms around her legs and rested her chin atop her knees, waiting for something, anything, to emerge. She heard the rustle of leaves, the snap of twigs, and saw Talanah’s head appear through the underbrush.

“Hey,” Talanah greeted, her eyes flicking between Aloy and the Cauldron, “anything?”

“Not yet,” Aloy murmured, shaking her head. Talanah dropped to the ground next to her, and Aloy saw her tonguing the gash on her lip from the corner of her eye.

“I don’t really want to question my good luck,” Aloy started, “but I thought you were coming along as my Hawk, and not as my friend?”

“Yeah, well,” Talanah said, rolling her shoulders and draping her arms over her legs, “you made a good point, about putting aside our differences. I didn’t want to go into that Cauldron hating you, and I guess it stuck.”

“I’m glad it did,” Aloy said, smiling at Talanah, who grinned cheekily in return.

For a while they sat, each of them staring at the gaping maw of the Cauldron, listening to the crickets chirping in the evening light.

“So,” Aloy said conversationally, “you and Ylma, huh?”

“Yep,” Talanah nodded slowly, “Erend wasn’t the only one who spent a lot of time in the Hammer when you were out of it. Except it wasn’t just the drink I was drowning my sorrows in.”

Aloy snorted, and shook her head with a wry grin, “Glad my life-threatening injuries were good for  _ something _ .”

Talanah hummed noncommittally, still looking pleased with herself, her eyes faraway. For a moment, Aloy wondered what it was like to have someone like that - somebody whose absence could be felt, as if it was tangible - and then she realised with a jolt in her belly that she  _ did _ have someone like that. Carefully, she hid her smile in her still-folded arms, and wondered if Erend was thinking of her, too.

The moon rose in the sky, and eventually, Talanah yawned.

“I’m heading back to the camp,” she announced, “but if Galand asks me one more time if I’m ‘the Hammer or the Forge’, I will give him a fat lip.”

Aloy laughed, “Thanks for the heads-up.”

Getting to her feet, Talanah twisted from side to side, like she was working the soreness from her muscles. She didn’t look like she’d taken too many hits, but Aloy couldn’t exactly see under her armour to check.

“You sure you don’t want to come back? One of the Vanguard can take watch - they’re used to it.”

“No, that’s okay,” Aloy replied, not unkindly, “I… I need to see this through.”

Smiling, Talanah nodded.

“Just make sure you get some sleep,” she said, before waving one last time, and disappearing into the trees. Aloy yawned widely, and settled back against the tree she was leaning against.

It was going to be a long night, but at least she was warm, and - for once - not in immediate danger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. Sorry for the double-post too, if some of you had duplicate emails - I wasn't happy with how short my first post of this was.
> 
> I had two things planned for this fic way before I even started outlining the plot properly. One was that argument between Aloy and Erend where he was trying to stop her from going off and getting hurt again (that scene was actually the first thing I wrote for this fandom ever). 
> 
> The other was that there’d be a problem with the machines that Aloy spends ages trying to figure out, but they just need to be turned off and on again.
> 
> Sorry not sorry.
> 
> I've posted some drabbles! [They're here!](http://spooopygames.tumblr.com/tagged/hzdfic)


	17. Seventeen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I apologise for taking TWO MONTHS to get this out. I don't really have an explanation or a reason or whatever; just couldn't write.
> 
> Second of all, there's porn! I didn't think it'd happen in this story, but I guess they're both hornier than I thought. If you feel that it's rushed or whatever: GOOD, that's important. Hold on to that.
> 
> If you're not here for porn: sorry about the porn, it's skippable.
> 
> Third, and last, of all: I'm doing NaNoWriMo! I'm doing the sequel to this fic for NaNoWriMo! Yay!!  
> I won't post it as I go, because I'm not that brave. I'll probably post snippets to my tumblr though, and then hopefully edit and post starting December.
> 
> If you want the snippets, my tumblr is [here](http://spooopygames.tumblr.com/), as always :)
> 
> Enjoy, and scream at me in the comments if you missed AP!

All through the night, Aloy kept up her silent vigil over the Cauldron. She was tired down to her bones, yet she was once again eluded by sleep, the thick scar that stretched across her thigh aching however she chose to rest her leg. 

She watched as, one by one, a small herd of Broadheads emerged from the mouth of the Cauldron, filling the circular cavern with blue light, yet even the satisfaction that she had succeeded was still not enough. 

Aloy busied herself picking through the new features she had added to her Focus while she waited for the sun to peak in the sky. She kept checking on the machines down in the cavern - none of them had ventured any further, and it was easy to see why they hadn’t. Aloy cursed under her breath.

“Broadheads!” Galand exclaimed all of a sudden, making Aloy jump out of her skin, “it actually worked!”

In the bushes behind Galand appeared the majority of the soldiers Aloy had lead towards the Cauldron, all of them leaning over with curiosity. Aloy was mildly surprised she hadn’t been alerted to their presence by the sound of bickering, as she had done every other time she had been separated from the main group during their mission. Maybe they had actually  _ listened _ to her.

“They aren’t coming out of the pit.”

“Nope.”

“Looks like they’ll need a ramp.” Basma interjected. Aloy frowned in thought, and Galand sighed.

“I guess climbing down and throwing them up here isn’t an option.”

“You should try it,” Talanah said loudly to him from within the crowd, “we can bury you once all of your insides are gouged out.”

The Hawks started jeering, and Basma smacked the nearest one upside the head to shut them up. After a quick lecture that even had Aloy wincing, she set the soldiers off felling trees for a ramp.

“One less problem,” Basma said, once the grumbling soldiers had departed for the deeper forest, where the sound of falling trees wouldn’t alert the Broadheads below.

“It’s getting them to Meridian that’ll be hard.” Aloy murmured, chewing her lip while she frowned. Undoubtedly, the machines would eventually make their way to Meridian on their own, as they always had. However, Aloy was eager to get the machines as close to the city as possible, to get the water clean as soon as possible, which meant that she couldn’t simply leave them to their own devices.

Basma stepped up beside Aloy, looked down to the machines and considered them, her head tilted and lips pursed in thought. Her golden Carja helmet reflected the sunlight that fell dappled through the trees.

“Can’t they be tamed?”

“I can’t do it without them attacking each other.”

“What if we destroy the other machines before they can attack?”

“I’d rather not waste the machines, as much as I need the shards in my purse,” Aloy replied, weighing up the options in her mind, “we  _ could _ take the overridden ones straight back to camp before the other machines notice. I think that would work.”

“Yeah, if anyone has the guts to ride these bastards,” Talanah joked, finally appearing at Aloy’s other side, “someone would need to stay behind to fend off the bandits, too.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be chopping down trees?” Aloy teased. Talanah stuck her tongue out.

Between the three of them, they hashed out a plan for retrieving the freshly-built machines. The soldiers, slowly but surely, constructed a sturdy-looking ramp, which they lowered into the pit while Aloy and some of the Hawks distracted the Broadheads by throwing rocks.

“When I ride the first one out, the angry ones will follow,” Aloy warned to the soldiers gathered around her, making some last-minute checks of her armour and weapons, thoroughly aware that she was about to drop into a pit of machines with horns long enough to gore her right through with one strike, “don’t fight them unless you can help it; we can’t afford to lose any of you. Just keep them away from camp.”

Some of the soldiers that had formed a loose circle around her nodded and grunted in recognition. Aloy guessed that none of them were particularly used to the stealthy take-all-hostages approach that she was going for, but she didn’t have any patience left to feel bad about it.

Carefully, keeping to the shadows, Aloy stalked down the ramp into the pit. There wasn’t much in the way of cover down there, and all of the half-formed strategies she had been mulling over for hours sprang to the forefront of her mind all over again. Luckily, the wooden logs barely moved under her weight, and she was able to get close enough to the small herd to be able to hear the whirr of their parts.

Aloy gripped her spear hard in her left hand, turning the rock in her right over and over, waiting for her moment. She crept as close to the nearest Broadhead as she dared before letting the pebble fly. It bounced off of the wall opposite, and all of the machines lifted their bulky heads in unison, amber light directed away from Aloy as she sprinted the remaining distance. Aloy tucked in her legs and ducked under the machine, making quick contact with her spear. Time felt like it had slowed to a crawl as she worked, frantically spinning the dials that were only visible through the display of her Focus.

Finally, the machine’s last defense fell away, and it was  _ hers _ . She scrambled back out from underneath it and leapt up onto its smooth metal back, steering it hard by the neck. She yanked it around to face the ramps, and any reservations she had about the sturdiness of the quickly-built structure were quickly pushed down as she dug her heels in hard enough to give herself bruises through her boots. The Broadhead jerked forward, its hooves loud on the ramp, as its herdmates finally noticed what was happening, bathing Aloy in red lights that were weak against the midday sunlight. The Broadhead, guided by Aloy, charged up the ramp and straight through the trees opposite. The forest whipped by in flashes of green and brown and bright and dark and Aloy couldn’t help the massive grin that spread across her face.

It felt good to be on the back of a machine again.

It didn’t take Aloy long to lose the hostile Broadheads from her trail. The soldiers that were at the Cauldron were tasked with keeping them busy and undamaged while she delivered the first tame Broadhead to the soldiers at the camp, and she knew that the longer she took, the more damaged the machines would be. 

They worked for at least a couple of hours, Aloy overriding the machines and taking them to the camp one by one. Every time she returned, the Cauldron had already spit out another to replace the one she had taken, and the herd was getting antsy.

“There’s gotta be a quicker way,” Aloy muttered under her breath, crouched behind a broad tree. Talanah leaned over her, looking over at the agitated machines.

“Tame one, and I’ll take it to camp,” she said, “then tame another and follow me.”

Aloy raised her eyebrow skeptically, but readied her spear regardless. 

“You sure?”

Talanah nodded.

Aloy picked out the nearest machine and began to stalk towards it, much the same as she had done for the previous ones. This time, however, Talanah was right on her heels, silent as a whisper. The beast she chose was overridden quickly, and she had to consciously remember to not immediately leap onto its back. Instead she turned toward Talanah and, in one smooth motion, boosted her up onto the machine.

“Kick it to go, turn it by its head,” Aloy said, running alongside Talanah, who had gone wide-eyed and pale, “I’ll be right behind you!”

Talanah disappeared into the treeline, the machine weaving under her unsure instruction. Aloy dodged its charging herdmate and dove into the bushes, letting the remaining soldiers handle the herd while the override component on her spear cooled down. Mentally, Aloy made a note to look into improving her spear - if it was possible - as she carefully counted the remaining machines. To get the water cleaner faster, she would need to look into a way to get the Cauldron to create Snapmaws instead of Broadheads, however, a herd of bulky machines like the Broadheads probably wasn’t going to hurt.

Between Aloy and Talanah - and the handful of other soldiers that volunteered to ride the machines away too - Talanah and Aloy had managed to amass enough Broadheads to frighten away even the most desperate of bandits. After spending a short lunch break poking around in the Cauldron interface, Aloy found she was able to direct the Cauldron to create Snapmaws and Glinthawks, and by the next morning they had amassed a small army of machines.

The march back to Meridian was much shorter than the march up had been, with each of them on the back of a machine. Aloy squinted into the descending sun, unable to wipe the grin from her face. Nobody behind her was bickering, and even if the party was travelling much slower than she would have been if she were alone, they would be back in their own beds by nightfall.

They rode into the Maizelands beneath the mesa to an audience of astounded civilians, and Aloy found herself summoned to the Sun-palace before she could even finish giving out orders. Talanah and Basma knew her plans well enough and, somewhat regretfully, Aloy dismounted her Broadhead and followed Avad’s messenger toward the elevators. 

The city itself had seen better days and Aloy was glad to be rushed through the dirty, stinking streets. The Sun-palace was radiant in the evening light, all of its torches aglow, and Aloy was lead straight up to the westernmost veranda. 

Avad’s face, upon first seeing her, was a picture. 

Erend’s was much better.

 

* * *

 

“You should have seen yourself,” Erend said, his voice rough and breath hot on her neck, “coming out of the desert with all of those machines, like some kind of goddess,”

“As long as you don’t start worshipping me,” Aloy teased. They were tangled up together in the covers of her bed, and had been since before nightfall. Erend lifted his head and looked her right in the eyes, a predatory smirk on his lips. 

“I’m going to worship you until the sun comes up,” he promised. He ducked his head and kissed her again, drawing her flush against him. Aloy felt the heat radiating from his body warm her from her core outwards, and she shivered pleasantly when he dragged his hand down her side, over her ribcage and into the dip of her waist before pausing on her hip and starting back upwards again. He left a sensitive trail of goosebumps along her skin beneath her tunic, and the sensation was almost maddening. His hand continued upwards to her breast, and she moaned into his mouth when she felt his thumb slip over her nipple. He made a noise to answer hers and did it again, rougher than the last, and she squirmed, pulling away from the kiss to gasp for air. 

“This okay?” he asked raggedly, his voice much rougher than it had been just moments before. She nodded, pulling him in again and kissing him hard while he touched her. The nipple he had been teasing had drawn into a hard peak, visible through her cotton tunic, and every single touch sparked through her like electricity. She squirmed again and he broke their kiss, trailing his mouth down her jawline and throat while she lay gasping, chest heaving. He balanced himself across her, his weight pressing her into the bed, and she couldn’t help the shuddering moan that spilled out of her when his mouth closed over her nipple through the tunic. He sucked hard and she squirmed harder, arching her back up towards him. 

Her fingers wound into his short hair and pressed his head deeper into her chest. He grunted in response, and she felt blunt fingernails drag up her thigh. A shiver of air brushed along her warm skin as he pushed the tunic up. He paused, and jolted up onto his elbows.

“You’re naked,” he accused. She snorted.

“Not really. That’s kind of what the tunic is for.”

Erend huffed, and ducked his head toward her again. “Smartass,” he mouthed against the sensitive skin in the crook of her neck, the rough palm of his hand continuing its path up her side and along her ribcage.

“So, you knew I would come here tonight?”

“Maybe I just sleep naked.”

“Apart from the tunic,”

“Right,” she replied, smiling. His hand had paused somewhere beneath her breast and she wished he’d keep touching her. 

Carefully, gently, she took him by the wrist and urged his hand further down her body again, not letting him stop at her belly.

"Aloy, what are you-?"

"I want you to touch me," she whispered, like it was a secret. She saw the knot in Erend's throat bob as he swallowed, doing nothing to abate the hungry look in his eyes.

"Don't you think this is too fast?"

"No," she replied, bemusedly, "why?"

Erend went to reply, but Aloy beat him to it.

"I want this," she said, glancing up at him from under her eyelashes. She let her gaze drift down his body, and the corner of her mouth quirked upwards when she caught sight of him, thick and hard inside his clothes, "you clearly want this too."   
Erend huffed a ragged breath out through his mouth.

"Damn right I want this," he growled, pushing her onto her back again. He peppered open-mouthed kisses along her collarbone and she wriggled beneath him, working the buttons on his clothes undone.

His knee wormed its way between her own, and the pressure of him between her legs was a very new and very pleasant feeling that made heat coil in her belly. Almost purely by instinct, she angled her hips into him, seeking relief from the building ache inside of her, and in doing so she felt again the solid, heavy weight of his erection pressing into her side.

She imagined, for a moment, what it might feel like to feel him pressing into her - really pressing into her - for the first time, and the coil of pleasure in her belly tightened at the realisation that that was where they were heading. She moaned and whimpered, blood afire with a heady feeling of lust and urgency- that she needed him, and needed him  _ now _ .

“Erend,” she gasped, “ _ Erend- _ “

Erend’s weight shifted onto his knee, and she felt another delicious wave of pleasure roll through her. 

“Shh,” he whispered, nuzzling into the side of her face, “you’ll be heard,”

Aloy didn’t care if she was overheard or not, but any reply she was going to make was stolen by his mouth when he kissed her again. She felt him move against her, a tell-tale push and pull of his hips telling her that she wasn’t the only one seeking relief. She reached down between them, her fingertips teasing the hairs on his chest as they passed, and gripped him in her hand. He grunted and jerked, pushing further into her hold, and moaned raggedly as she squeezed. He quickly fell into a rhythm, pushing his hips into her loose fist, and when her hand came away to grip his arm, the fire in her belly at its peak, he didn’t stop, grinding himself against the inside of her thigh. He shifted, and she jumped as she felt the rough fabric of his trousers and the solid length within press against her vagina. 

He moaned again, breath hot in her ear. 

“Wanna be inside you,” he groaned, continuing the slow rhythm of his hips into hers. 

“Yes-“ she gasped, “ _ yes.” _

All of a sudden, he was gone again. The bed moved as he sat back on his ankles, shrugging off the open halves of his shirt, tugging at the ties of his trousers. Aloy followed, shimmying out of her tunic and tossing it away as if it had burned her. Once it was gone he surged against her again, his bare chest to hers, his trousers pushed down to his knees, the heat radiating from his body almost too much to bear. She felt his erection again, naked skin to naked skin, and her heart leapt into her throat.

“If it hurts,” he said, shifting away from her so he could kick the rest of his clothes off. The sudden rush of cool air between them raised goosebumps on her skin and she gripped his shoulders, “if I do  _ anything _ that hurts you, tell me to stop.”

Not trusting her voice, she nodded jerkily. He lowered his head and licked her nipple, settling himself between her legs as he did so. He leaned into her, letting her feel the weight of his body, and she almost cried with frustration and want.

First, she felt his fingers touch her, test her. She gripped his shoulders harder, her fingernails biting into his skin. The sensation was almost indescribably good, but his fingers were still not enough. They moved smoothly within her, already slick, and she jerked in surprise when he touched a sensitive spot with the pad of his thumb. All too soon, his fingers were gone.

He moved again, leaning back and looking down at her with black eyes. He watched her squirm and pant, holding her gaze the whole time. He took himself in hand, fingers still wet from being inside her, and she couldn’t help but look for a brief second before she had to look away again. She was shivering with lust and nerves. He moved over her slowly, deliberately, kissing a path up from her breastbone to her lips. 

She felt it then - the hot, wet touch of his blunt head - and then, finally, the burning press of him pushing deep inside her.


	18. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is it.  
> This is the longest story I've written, and finished. I had some small hiccups on the way, and there are still things that I would iron out, but I can finally consider this story finished.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has read along the way, and those of you who have binged the whole thing in one, and everyone in between. This was for you as much as for me, and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I did.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who as commented and left kudos. This wouldn't have been finished without you proving that I'm not just shouting into the void.
> 
> Enjoy this short epilogue, and I'll see you in the sequel :)

Sunlight filtered down onto her through canopies of leaves, and birds chirped overhead. 

Ahead of her on the trail scouted a pair of Watchers, the light from their eye stalks a pale purple colour. It had taken two weeks for the water in Meridian to run completely clear, once there were enough Snapmaws stationed upriver. It would take much longer for the ill to recover, but at least nobody was at risk of contracting anything worse, any more.

Aloy stretched restlessly on the back of her Broadhead. She wasn’t far from the edge of the Nora land, and she felt uneasy at the prospect of returning. She had felt uneasy ever since she had been collecting the machines from Cauldron Sigma, and had emerged to find a party of Braves waiting for her. 

Speaking to her. 

Telling her that, after everything, Teersa was not dead, and she was not an Outcast. 

She still didn’t know how to feel about that.

She had dawdled at the Cauldron, gathering more machines than was strictly necessary, reluctant to confront the Nora. When she had been in Meridian, and had known that she needed to go back, Erend had scoffed. 

“Fuck ‘em,” he had said, slurred from exhaustion, wearing nothing but her bedsheets and a lazy grin, “the machines’ll get down there soon enough,”

Aloy couldn’t just leave them, though. Teersa’s face had been the first to come to mind, followed closely by Varl and Teb, and Mera and her baby son. 

Even if Lansra would never trust her, and even though they had dragged her out of their lands by her hair, Aloy couldn’t leave them to die. 

(She had learned from her mistakes, though. When Erend awoke later, alone and in a cold bed, there was a note on her pillow).

Aloy blew a stream of air out through her nose when she finally caught sight of the tall guard posts over the treetops. She changed the protocols of the two dozen Striders between her and the Watchers, telling them to follow instead of lead, and took her position at the point of the strange group. The Watchers flanked her automatically, their heads bobbing on their long necks. She heard the shouts go up before she saw any Braves, and she paused ten metres or so before the gate, arms raised in a sign of peace. 

“Aloy!” someone shouted, and the gate opened to reveal a familiar face; one she had not expected to see so soon. “You came back!”

Teb looked pleased to see her, if not still wary of the machines she had brought. She lowered her arms slowly, and focused on a point above his head.

She couldn’t leave the Nora to die, but she couldn’t forgive them, either.

“The machines will heal the land,” she said through the lump in her throat, by way of explanation, “they will not attack people, or each other, but they will need an escort.”

“That’s fine,” Teb said, “you’re still a Seeker, technically, so-...” he paused, then, and she finally looked at his face. He was considering her, and the happiness in his expression bled away. “You don’t mean you, do you?”

Aloy shook her head, and Teb nodded, his lips pressed together.

“I’ll direct them to the old Strider grounds. You just need to make sure they’re not attacked before they get there.”

“Alright,” he said finally, “consider it done.”

While she reconfigured the Striders once more - for the final time, hopefully - Teb relayed the instructions to the gathered Braves. Two by two, the Striders filed past her and through the gate, one Watcher at the lead and the other taking the rear. As soon as they entered Nora land, Aloy saw through her Focus as they were flanked by a handful of Braves, and she nodded to herself, satisfied.

“What does the purple light mean?” One of the remaining Braves asked loudly, his tone defiant.

Aloy looked up, and stared him straight in the eye. He was young, and she remembered him from the Proving, from before everything that had happened. 

“It means they’re mine,” she said fiercely.

Once all of the machines had gone, the Braves followed, quickly losing interest in her. She would be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that it stung, just a little, even if she preferred it that way. 

“There’s a place for you here, you know,” Teb said, making one last effort. Aloy looked past him, into the open gate and the Embrace within.

Aloy shook her head. 

“No, there isn’t.”


End file.
